[xliff-tools] The Fuzzy Flag

[Josep Condal]

Hi Bruno,

I think that my message below was too terse and was misunderstood. I didn't mean that the fact that there is no source in the PO makes it less reliable for the translator (it is true, but I wasn't referring to that). I meant that there is the assumption that if you put something on the <alt-trans> area then you must necessarily put also the corresponding source of it, and you don't seem have the source for the fuzzy text in the PO file.

Look at the definition of alt-trans in the XLIFF spec:

---
Translation match - The <alt-trans> element contains possible translations in <target> elements along with optional context, notes, etc. The optional match-quality attribute provides a value indicating the exactness of the match between the <source> of the <alt-trans> and that of the <source> element of the parent <trans-unit>; e.g. "90%".
----

This implies that in the alt-trans pairs the target must be translation of the source (no matter how good or bad from a quality point of view) so the source can be compared to the parent unit that you want to translate.  There is a reliability problem if you don't do so.  What we know of a fuzzy match is that it is not the translation of the source, so the XLIFF editors will be able to make less assumptions if you don't feed this area with aligned pairs.

Therefore, in my opinion, the only options are either to ignore the fuzzy completely (treat it as new translation and forget about it) from the process, or try to leverage it in the target part, but making sure that the translated flag is set to "no", so a neon ;) warning can be shown to the translator for that specific segment in the XLIFF editor.  The latter seems to have more sense (at least for longer fuzzy matches with more than 4 words); short fuzzy matches should be called garbage matches as it takes more translator time to process them than with a new translation.

Regards,

Josep.


-----Mensaje original-----
De: Bruno Haible [mailto:bruno at clisp.org] 
Enviado el: miércoles, 16 de febrero de 2005 17:50
Para: Josep Condal; xliff-tools at lists.freedesktop.org
Asunto: Re: [xliff-tools] The Fuzzy Flag

Josep Condal wrote:
> I think that this approach requires that source of the fuzzy match is 
> known and if I get it right, the source of the fuzzy match is not 
> available in the PO file, so its not clear how tools can provide 
> reliable information to the translator.

True: it would be better if msgmerge would not lose the source (msgid) where the fuzzy translation comes from. However, as explained in the answer to Rodolfo Raya, I don't think this matters a lot.

Bruno