Bug 16679

Summary: Translatability problems in system preferences
Product: Koha Reporter: Marc Véron <veron>
Component: I18N/L10NAssignee: Bugs List <koha-bugs>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Testopia <testopia>
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P5 - low CC: f.demians, jetkiwi
Version: Main   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
See Also: https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16669
Change sponsored?: --- Patch complexity: ---
Documentation contact: Documentation submission:
Text to go in the release notes:
Version(s) released in:
Circulation function:
Bug Depends on: 16687    
Bug Blocks:    

Description Marc Véron 2016-06-07 08:46:53 UTC
Koha's system preferences are constructed and displayed in a very elegant way in English, but not all languages have the same syntax, and we get a lot of translation issues due to sentence splitting. 

In some cases, translators can work around such problems, but we will always have odd translations. Odd translations do not look very professional at all, and they can lead to misunderstandings and misconfigurations.

Additionally, it is very frustrating and discouraging for translators.

IMO, the best way to get rid of such translation problems would be to use whole sentences, followed by the preference's value.

Example (taken from Bug 16669):

Instead of...
[Don't use/Use] CAS for login authentication.

...the following would be much better in terms of translatability:
Use CAS for login authentication: [Yes / No]
Comment 1 Marc Véron 2016-06-07 09:10:32 UTC
Candidates for separate bugs blocking this umbrella bug (in usr/share/kohaclone/koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/en/modules/admin/preferences):

acquisitions.pref  enhanced_content.pref  opac.pref          tools.pref
admin.pref         i18n_l10n.pref         patrons.pref       web_services.pref
authorities.pref   labs.pref              searching.pref
cataloguing.pref   local_use.pref         serials.pref
circulation.pref   logs.pref              staff_client.pref
Comment 2 Katrin Fischer 2020-01-11 13:44:42 UTC
I disagree with the solution - I think this brings us straight back to the previous system preferences editor (not a lot might remember). I think the ideal solution would be to be able to tanslate the whole pref values in one go instead of splitting them up in the translation tools. Having something like

[Allow|Dont'allow] staff patrons to do x.

With the option to move around the first bit within the sentence.