Outdated POT file and other i18n issues

  • Hi,

    I came across an issue with the language files where a lot of strings where not translated and not in the locale files. The reason is the POT file is outdated and, therefore, it cannot be used to update the PO files for translating the plugin.

    Also, there’re a lot of strings that where changed and outdated prior translations (postcode vs post code, for example, which is not in the translation files). And a lot of other strings that have concatenations or that are missing translator comments and don’t work in other languages, at least in latin languages like Portuguese, with no neutral gender and singular/plural issues.

    For example, a string like There are no often doesn’t work, because we don’t have a neutral gender. In Portuguese, Contacts is masculine, but Invoices is feminine.

    Vitals is concatenated with Status in contact record, which is clumsy and very hard to translate.

    These are just a few examples. I would hope that this far in development, JCRM would already have fixed many of these issues.

    It is very unproductive to contribute to the translation and try to use a quality version in our language with so many unresolved i18n issues.

    Thanks.

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  • Plugin Support Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    Hello @alvarogois,

    Thanks for reporting this – I also see you’re a Polyglots member, so thank you so much in advance for the invaluable work you do by translating WordPress and Jetpack CRM in Portuguese (Italian Polyglots member here ?? )

    I see that the stable version is sitting at 59% of completion; I wonder if this is something to consider when addressing your feedback.

    Can you point me to the missing strings you found in the POT?

    I have reached out to our i18n team meanwhile to ask for more suggestions and advice on this.

    Plugin Support Stef (a11n)

    (@erania-pinnera)

    Hello @alvarogois,

    Thanks for bearing with me while I checked this with our developers and Internationalization team.

    WordPress doesn’t yet have great support for dynamic strings that may have gendered nuances. We recommend looking at the translations of difficult strings in other languages for creative ideas around this in the meantime. The Italian Polyglots team has a glossary people can check when in doubt; I don’t know if Portuguese has something similar.

    For gendered strings, we usually recommend that the developers add “context” to the strings, which allows for two different versions of the string depending on the context: our developers are doing their best, and if you spot something to report in detail, please do.

    For the concatenation issue, until it’s fixed in the code, it’s best if you can change the structure of the sentence to account for this. We sometimes recommend using a colon or a form that accepts either gender.

    To borrow an example from French, There are no could be Il n'y a auncun-e-s.

    For gendered concatenated strings, we should do better about using _x() in some cases, but in most situations, we rely on the translators’ skills, experience, and creativity: the string is often dynamic and could be any gender, and at some point, it may involve rewording the phrase or including multigender solutions (a bit like in English we may say post(s)).

    As for the state of our code: strings are something our developers have personally worked on getting more translation-friendly. There’s not a magic way to detect these, though, so specific examples of where one sees the problem is helpful to log.

    We’re constantly trying to improve strings we run across that are not properly wrapped for translation or are redundant. This number has doubled in the last year for Jetpack CRM, but if there are specific areas where strings aren’t available or problematic, let us know the pages and the phrases so we can fix them.

    As for the POT, the file is generated every time we release it; it looks like the last PO file is from 6 weeks ago for version 5.1.0. The content in GlotPress should be current with that version.

    Hope that answers your question! Again, we appreciate their hard work to get things translated into Portuguese.

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