This is part of splitting up bug 41971.

This task involves getting around the problem that gettext assumes that
strings with duplicate content should be translated only one.
This is likely not the case for the text in the search bar and the search
translations, as we are asking translators to translate part of a sentence.

Darin suggested the workaround of preceding or proceeding each string that
should specifically be translated separately by a character we will not use (eq
! or %) and then stripping the character before displaying.  A comment should
also be above the string in need of translation to explain why this was done to
the translators.



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-20 17:42:33 ----

Bug 45314 describes a way to change the US English version of search that would
also have a side effect of making it translatable.



------- Additional Comments From rebecka@eazel.com 2001-01-17 15:46:35 ----

wrong bug.  Sorry.




------- Additional Comments From rebecka@eazel.com 2001-01-17 18:48:47 ----

Here is one way to fix this problem.  
I'd like to change the text that will occur in the search bar to 
translated like this:

/* Menu item in the search bar.  Parenthensized items are context, and are 
	   message strings elsehwere.  Translate only the word "Name" here, as it 
	   should appear in this context. */
	N_("(Search for) Name (contains \"fish\")"),
	/* Menu item in the search bar.  Parenthensized items are context, and are 
	   message strings elsehwere.  Translate only the word "Content" here, as it 
	   should appear in this context. */
	N_("(Search for) Content (includes all of \"fish tree\""),
	/* Menu item in the search bar.  Parenthensized items are context, and are 
	   message strings elsehwere.  Translate only the word "Type" here, as it 
	   should appear in this context. */
	N_("(Search for) Type (is regular file)"),
	/* Menu item in the search bar.  Parenthensized items are context, and are 
	   message strings elsehwere.  Translate only the word "Size" here, as it 
	   should appear in this context. */
	N_("(Search for) Size (larger than 400K)"),
etc.

Before displaying the string, translated or not, parenthesized items would
be removed from the string, leaving only the string translated for this context.
On second thought however, perhaps square brackets ('[' and ']') would be
better in this context.  The idea is the same, though.

Do you think this would be an ok way to address this problem?





------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2001-01-18 03:10:43 ----

I think this would work. It's only one thing that I'm unsure about and that is
the lack of the word "that" in the contexts. I'm not sure if it is ok to leave
out in English but it can't be left out in, for example, Swedish.
For example, the translation of "Search for name contains 'fish'" would not be a
proper sentence in Swedish, but "Search for name that contains 'fish'" would.

Other than that, I think this proposal may work as it removes a lot of the
context ambiguity in translation from the current design of the search
interface.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2001-01-18 14:11:52 ----

Yes!  Great solution.  Let's do this for 1.0.




------- Additional Comments From rebecka@eazel.com 2001-01-31 18:12:35 ----

I've added contextual messages and brief explanations.
Things work fine in english now, but it would be great if a translator could
verify that this works with updated translations.  If you have time, Christian,
I'd really appreciate it.  Thanks.




------- Additional Comments From menthos@menthos.com 2001-02-02 07:19:13 ----

Updated Swedish search comments with context are now added. Norpan, could you
also try this?



------- Additional Comments From d95mback@dtek.chalmers.se 2001-02-05 05:26:37 ----

The translation is correct, but the feature is not very useful still because
there are no line breaks. I made a bug report on that. Bug #46313




------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------