[CPS-translators] Re: Special characters in translations

Julien Anguenot ja at nuxeo.com
Fri Oct 28 18:49:19 CEST 2005


Stefano Schintu wrote:
> I was wondering if I should use HTML/XHTML entities instead of special
> characters, as letters with accents or apostrophe, in the
> translations.
> If I should use entities is it better to use entities names or entities numbers?
> 
> Thank you,
> Stefano

Marc Aurèle's answer below :

At the moment CPS is Latin9 (ISO-8859-15) centric. All of our code only
handle Latin9.

Considering this context, we should not use entities (for example for
accented characters) but only the true Latin9 characters. The rationale
is that it makes the code and translation files much easier to read and
maintain. Also there is, for quite some time now, a perfect support in
all browsers for all the Latin9 characters (this was not the case in the
past).

An exception would be a contributor that could not type non-ASCII
characters on his workstation because he/she doesn't know how to do it,
hasn't a keyboard that could do so, etc.

As for the *.po files, they could really be written in many different
encodings, this is the case for CPSSkins. But for the other CPS products
than CPSSkins we have chosen a simple message to all contributors and
translators: write all *.po files in Latin9 (ISO-8859-15).

In the past at Nuxeo *.po files were a mix of UTF-8 and Latin9 and
regularly a developer would break some files. That's why we have now
a full Latin9 approach before we switch to a full UTF-8 approach.

Conclusion
----------

Please use Latin9 and do not use entities unless
there is a good reason for it.

	J.
-- 
Julien Anguenot | Nuxeo R&D (Paris, France)
CPS Platform : http://www.cps-project.org
Zope3 / ECM   : http://www.z3lab.org
mail: anguenot at nuxeo.com; tel: +33 (0) 6 72 57 57 66



More information about the cps-translators mailing list
More information about CPS: CPS project - CVS - API

Hosting: Nuxeo: Zope service provider


This list archive provided by Nuxeo, the leaders of open source ECM. Check out the Nuxeo 5 open source, standards-based ECM project.