Whenever we work on the Brazilian Portuguese translations for Ubuntu Linux through the Rosetta system, we come across some strings that are pretty straight forward to translate, such as “The book is on the table”. hehehe But… not all strings are as obvious and require some further investigation. Our team has compiled a document (pt_BR) which not only explains how Launchpad and Rosetta work, but also has a section dedicated to some of the “hairy” strings we’ve come across.

This article is my attempt to demonstrate, in a somewhat more graphical manner, some of our best practices for when dealing with these cases. First case: A “normal” string

Here we can see that the variables %s do not get translated and are kept in the final translated string.

Second case: Dealing with the [tab] character

A lot of people will substitute the [tab] character for an actual tab, but… The instruction right between the two text boxes will tell you to leave them as they are in the final translated string. Third case: Dealing with the↵ character

Here you are supposed to replace the arrow with a new line character, by pressing the ENTER key.

Fourth case: Dealing with the • character

The little dot represents a blank space that needs to be inserted into the translated string. What if the string has 10 little dots? Well, you guessed it. You’ll have to insert 10 blank spaces.

We can see from the message above that it was actually derived from the Tray.cs file from the Tomboy program, as show below:

Fifth case: Dealing with text within XML tags

The final case I want to demonstrate is how to deal with those pesky strings which have embedded XML tags in them. The good news is that you do not translate the attributes inside the tags themselves, but only the text surrounded by them. In this case, the word “here” is the only part that gets translated.

Well, hopefully this was helpfull/informative to some of you. I’m planning to add more articles related to how to participate with the Ubuntu community soon.