Translation linewidth policy

Martin Geisler mg at daimi.au.dk
Mon Feb 23 11:03:25 CST 2009


Isaac Jurado <diptongo at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to have the Spanish translation before the end of this
> week, but I have a doubt.

Great!

> I know the line width should be 80, but what happens if the original
> string is less than 80 but the translated one has to be truncated?

The default line width is 70 in Emacs, and I think most of the strings
follow this.

As to what happens, then it depends on how the string is used. In the
command help texts it is assumed that the first line can be used on its
own in 'hg help'. So if you translate that into something longer and
wrap the line in the translation, then only the first line will be used.

The help texts for the command line options are another potential
problem. If they are too long, things just look weird. Here I've added
some 'blah blah' to the --dry-run flag:

 -n --dry-run  do not perform actions, just print output blah blah bl
ah blah blah blah blah

We should probably wrap the output line this at some point:

 -n --dry-run  do not perform actions, just print output blah blah
               blah blah blah blah blah

But this should be done automatically and not by the translators. I
would suggest that you translate the string as one line and try to make
it a short one for now.

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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