S Page, 14/02/2013 08:19:
- It feels odd to duplicate dozens of messages solely because of the
dropped punctuation. The trailing ':' arises from using the message in a horizontal layout where English has the punctuation convention Password: ______ But this is a property of the form layout rather than the text. Has anyone considered separating the colon punctuation from messages? I checked and a few languages don't use the colon in their translations; I couldn't tell if some non-Roman language uses other punctuation like a dot or ->. There is a 'colon-separator' message but it includes a trailing space as well.
It's not only about punctuation: the fact that it's the same word in all contexts in English doesn't mean that it will be the same in other languages. There are some that will vary wildly and you surely can't know beforehand. That said, we do add things like arrows via PHP to localise them automatically, but I don't know exactly when/if this is encouraged. A similar problem is in what cases the first letter of a string should be made lowercase or uppercase by the code itself rather than relying on translators, and so on. This, however, has consistency as an aim, not translation saving: for instance I believe the purpose of colon-separator (like pipe-separator) is to let wikis customise as they wish without breaking stuff, a feature used rather often.
- My first attempt at MessagesQqq documentation for these was only:
'userlogin-yourpassword' => "Same as yourpassword but no trailing colon",
Siebrand didn't like it :) . I can duplicate the existing explanation, but how should I note that it's the same text as another message except for the punctuation change? Several of the existing messages have {{Identical|Username}}, I could use that but it's really {{Identical but for punctuation}}.
You don't really have to worry about that; {{identical}} is a nice tag for translatewiki.net use, but translators have translation memory anyway. Your qqq is wrong because it doesn't describe what the message is and does but how it looks in English (which the translator knows already): useful docs are things like "button on the form X which does Y", "label next to the field X in form Y blabla" or shorter versions if you're lazy. :)
- What's the URL on translatewiki to see the MessagesQqq help in
context with its templates expanded?
Edit the /en message or visit <key>/qqq. https://translatewiki.net/wiki/MediaWiki:Colon-separator/qqq Except for templates, /qqq mostly works on any wiki, although it could be nicer: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41578
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount , log out first.
So the problem is that you now have
Password ____
instead of
Password: _______
? By the way I hope "Joining Wikipedia is free", "help me choose", "We can create an account for you!" are local customisations of the messages containing the strings right before them and not something part of the code...
Nemo