Hi translators!
I'm putting my tech writing colleague Cody in copy.
Since 2012 (!), we've use CSS classes to consistently format some bits
of our documentation. The '<span class="application">' and such. See
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/how/documentation/guidelines/#index3h1
I'm now wondering if we should stop doing that to make translations easier.
I started doing that because I think it was in the GNOME guidelines.
It also makes the source code more semantic (imagine we decide to change
the way all application names are display for some reason) and a bit
easier to review.
So I stuck to that for all these years even if it makes the writing more
heavy.
Only some days ago did I realize that this might be a real pain for
translators to translate and maintain. Of course, you've been dealing
with that for years and already know how to do it well, but what about
newer translators and future teams?
I haven't done much translations myself and I've never used Weblate, so
I'd like to know how much of a relief it would be if we stopped writing
this way and used Markdown instead.
For example:
- <span class="application">Tails Installer</span>
Would become:
- *Tails Installer*
I'm also interested in:
- Whether it depends on your translation tools, for example, if PO Edit
is affected in the same way as Weblate. They might be easier to
translate on some tool than other or some tools might detect broken
HTML.
- Hearing from how do this goes for the less technical of our
translators. Say someone who doesn't otherwise know HTML. How frequent
is it for newer translators to made mistakes on these?
- Whether you think that Markdown instead of HTML would lower the error
rates. Because I still want application names to display in italic :)
--
sajolida
