[openstack-dev] [nova] translations gone wild

Sean Dague sean at dague.net
Thu Feb 26 13:46:49 UTC 2015


On 02/26/2015 08:28 AM, Ihar Hrachyshka wrote:
> I have some experience in i18n for other project (GNOME), so I have
> some answers to your questions.
> 
> On 02/26/2015 02:18 PM, Sean Dague wrote:
>> This morning in the nova channel we were trying to get to the
>> bottom of the unit tests failing lxsi and gillard in en_GB on some
>> string comparisons. Something is breaking down in our i18n null
>> fixture for the tests.
> 
>> However, in trying to track down the route of their messages I ran
>> into things like this:
> 
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/nova.po#L1410-L1411
> 
> 
> 
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/nova.po#L3481-L3485
> 
> 
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/nova.po#L5790-L5793
> 
> 
> 
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/nova.po#L3278-L3282
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> So, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means that when
>> running in en_US those log messages are going to get overridden.
>> And in many of these cases they are getting overridden to
>> completely unrelated messages.
> 
> No, those messages are marked as 'fuzzy'. They were filled in by
> gettext heuristics, but without a translator to go thru them and
> unmark them as 'fuzzy', the translations are not applied.
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Fuzzy-Entries.html

Ok, awesome. Good to learn new things.

>> That seems quite dangerous. Is there a reason that en_US locale
>> tree exists at all (given that we've treated it as base locale
>> historically). It seems like it's existence can only cause issues.
> 
> In theory, en_US locale may be used to fix typos without touching the
> translatable message (to avoid getting the existing messages in other
> languages untranslated). This approach is usually applied when in
> message freeze mode, when developers are forbidden to touch the
> messages, but translators still want to remove typos for en_US users.
> 
> I don't know how this applies to openstack though, since I'm not sure
> whether we enforce string freeze here, and whether translators care
> about occasional typos in en_US UX.

We do string freeze in theory, in practice I'm not sure how careful
things end up being.

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net

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