[xliff-tools] Another question on PO and XLIFF

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

Hi Rodolfo,

On Mon, 2 May 2005 23:39, Rodolfo M. Raya wrote:
> Line breaks are defined by the translator. When translations are long,
> you find things like this:
>
>
> msgid ""
> "Short text in the original"
> msgstr ""
> "long translation, that spans to perhaps two "
> "lines or more in the target language because "
> "it does not fit in the dialogue where it has "
> "to be displayed"
>
>
> Translators add the necessary line breaks at translation time in the
> editor. Lines are usually kept shorter than 70~80 characters.

I might have misunderstood you here, but in this example the msgstr at runtime 
would be one long line without newline characters. But I assume you here 
meant that translators add the necessary '\n' characters to break the target 
string into multiple lines at runtime.

In an XLIFF editor, instead of manually adding newlines to be able to see the 
whole *long* string in the editor window, shouldn't it be word-wrapped (and 
visually indicated some how), and real newline characters represent newline 
characters in the source format? If you look at other source formats like 
html, this would be the case (for elements like text-area values where 
xml:space is set to 'preserve').

just my two cents :)

cheers,
asgeir