[development] Seeking help internationalizing Views (and Panels and maybe other modules for D6)

[Eric-Alexander Schaefer]

Gerhard Killesreiter schrieb:
>> KDE's i18n() function (same as t() for Drupal) has an optional "context" 
>> parameter that the developer specifies in order to help the translators out.
>> (That context later appears as comment in the .pot file, I believe.)
>>
>> Maybe it would be an option to include something like this in some way, in 
>> order to provide an actual middle ground between "no UI-related context in 
>> the .pot file" and "no code-related context in the UI string".
> 
> Drupal already does something similar if you do not use pre-built PO
> files. The PO comments are filled with the URLs of the places the string
>  was encountered first. Not perfect of course, but maybe someting to
> build on.

I am using a very simple i18n-System in an application, where the 
argument to translate() is not an english text, but a text token. The 
token is itself text an it can contain context. I did that not only for 
easing translation but for creating "namespaces" for text. In most 
application including drupal one word might sometimes be translated 
diffent depending on the context. A simple example is the german word 
"Himmel", which can be translated to "sky" as well as "heaven", 
depending on context. So the tokens could look like this:
"ADMINISTRATION_SITE_BUILDING_MODULE_CONFIGURATION_MENU_ITEM_CAPTION".
If you define a token naming policy carefully, the translator knows the 
context just by looking at the token (Thats the caption of the menu item 
pointing to the module configuration section.). With this 
translate-function, every string in every language must be contained in 
a translation file, which could be considered flexible.

HTH,
Eric