Hello Community,
I've thought about this translation problem again, and I guess, it might be best to give an example. So please consider a configuration option "font_size". This could take the values "small", "medium" and "large". The English help text could be:
The size of the font: small, medium or large
The german translation
Die Größe der Schrift: klein, mittel oder groß
won't work.(*) But what about:
Die Größe der Schrift: small (klein), medium (mittel) oder large (groß)
resp. in Russian
Размер шрифта:small (маленький), medium (средний) или large (большой).
IMO this should be clear enough for the users. Well, the italic font might be replaced by a bold one, but that's a matter of styling only. It might be even better to write "small" instead of
small. But currently I prefer the <i>, because it could be read as "
idiom" by translators. But -- however the string given to the translator might be dubious. So, what if the string is:
The size of the font: small (small), medium (medium) or large (large)
Now it should be much clearer for the translator, what is to translate and which terms should not be translated. But for the English reader this is rather strange. A solution could be default.php, available since CMSimple_XH 1.5 anyway. While in en.php it could be
The size of the font: small, medium or large
in default.php it could be
The size of the font: small (small), medium (medium) or large (large)
So the translation should be done from default.php instead of en.php.
What do you think about it?
Christoph
(*) It's possible to check against localized words ($cf['font_size'] == $tx['small'] etc.), but that won't work for multi language sites. And so, as it's not possible to internationalize these words, it's questionable to internationalize the configuration variables in the display IMO.