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]
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
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.