Today I went to update my translation of Dia, but a lot of strings have a changed format that doesn't work for my language.

po:165
Original:	⌘0	ToolsModify
Việt:	✘?	/Công cụ/Sửa đổi

The forward slashes which separate the two terms have been removed in the original string, and the English terms joined together. 

1. This does not work in my language, which is monosyllabic, and relies on each word being separate.

2. Because my language is monosyllabic, translated terms usually have more words than the original term. Where the original string here was two English words, now joined together, my translation is _four_ Vietnamese words, which I can't join together.

So what format is appropriate? I will have to separate the two terms somehow, but I don't know how that will affect the application. Are these strings displayed complete? Do they need to be short for some reason?

Probably the best result in my language would be to use an arrow, which implies the existing structure:

po:165
Original:	⌘0	ToolsModify
Việt:	✘?	Công cụ → Sửa đổi

but would that be OK in the Dia display?

I don't want to go ahead and update all those strings, until I know what format is appropriate. :S

If you do have a required length or format, it really helps if you include a translator comment. In the next release of gettext, there will be a separate context line:

msgctxt "context"
      msgid "original"
      msgstr "translation"

which will make all that so much easier.

I'll wait to hear from you before updating the translation.

from Clytie, Vietnamese translator