Looking for tips and/or tools on how to efficiently work with gettext PO files when making small edits to large msgid values.
Example: We have lots of multi-sentence/multi-paragraph messages that are stored in our PO message catalog files. If we make a very minor change to a message, perhaps editing a single sentence or even correcting punctuation, we lose our original translation when we run the msgmerge utility.
Rather than re-translate long messages (that have already gone through an editorial approval process) from scratch, our translators return to backup copies of their PO files and manually search for the text of the last msgid/msgstr translation pair which they then diff against the current msgid values to see what has changed, followed by a copy and paste of the last translation which they then edit to reflect the updated msgid value.
That’s a lot of work! Certainly there must be a better way of handling this type of workflow?
Is there a best practice way to archive and find previous translations that are no longer in a PO file? One idea that comes to mind is to store a unique msg id in the text of our messages or in the comments that precede our message and use this id to retrieve previous msgid/msgstr translation pairs for review. Or are there PO editors or online services that make this process more efficient?
Thank you,
Malcolm
Virtaal‘s translation memory support can probably help with this. If your original units are in the translation memory, it will be shown (with differences) within a certain margin of change (based on Levenshtein distance). It will still contain the original (unmodified) translation, but at least the original text is more easily accessible and the differences highlighted.
I’m not 100% sure, but Pootle might also offer a web based solution. If you need any help, ask in #pootle on FreeNode.
The more general improvement is, of course, to separate/segment the units as far as possible.