sorting translation entries

[Valient Gough]

Dafydd Harries wrote:
>Ar 02/01/2005 am 12:52, ysgrifennodd Valient Gough:
>  
>>I've been sorting my translation strings (POT file) in rough order by 
>>most desired translations first, so translators will see them first in 
>>Rosetta.  I don't know how Rosetta plans on dealing with sorting (if at 
>>all), so I'll describe how I've handled it for my project.
>>    
>
>We've thought about adding support for guessing about how difficult a
>string is to translate, based on things such as how long it is, whether
>it has plural forms, whether it has variable substitutions etc.
>
>The main disadvantage to this is that related messages are often (though
>not always) near each other in the .pot file, and seeing related
>messages together often helps in having a consisitent translation.
>
>  
I see -- it is probably a good assumption that translations are more 
helpful when dealing with more complex sentences..

But I want to sort based on most-frequently-displayed -- so the strings 
which are displayed most often get priority for translation.  My typical 
application has lots of common strings, along with strings which are 
only seen during setup or usage message, and then strings which are only 
seen if something very strange has happened (warning messages, debug 
messages).

Those warning messages, when the program detects an unexpected state, 
may be very verbose to try and provide lots of information for 
debugging, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily the best to 
translate because I expect that if my program is working well that 
nobody will every see the strings at all..

I have a rough ordering of tags right now based on such frequency 
groupings.  I don't mind if the tags are re-ordered within a group, but 
I don't want to drop my ordering for an automated grouping from an 
algorithm that knows nothing about my program.

If you use an algorithm to sort entries, then you optimize for the 
average or mean case.  An individual can do a better job on any 
particular case, so I think the goal should be to either enable directed 
grouping (within user-specified subgroups) or as a bootstrap for 
otherwise unsorted applications (but don't override sorting provided 
later by the user).

regards,
Valient