msgid vs. defaultMessage

[erral]

In many places in Plone we use a placeholder msgid and then the translatable string goes to defaultMessage.

For instance we have this:

<strong i18n:translate="label_name">Name</strong>

instead of

<strong i18n:translate="">Name</strong>

These strings create the following entries in the po file:

# defaultMessage: Name
msgid "label_name"
msgstr ""

msgid "Name"
msgstr ""

This creates confusion when using tools like Weblate, because these tools place the value of msgid in the translation box, and many users think that what they need to translate is label_name instead of Name.

We need to check if this is something we can change in Plone, remove all defaultMessages or something else can be done in Weblate.

[davisagli]

Weblate is broken and not interpreting the file correctly then. Plone intentionally uses msgids to help disambiguate in case the same string is used in different contexts.

[erral]

Weblate could be broken, of course. But we don't use the defaultMessage thing consistently, and we have msgids with defaltMessages and msgids without them, so we don't have neither "Monolingual gettext files", neither "bilingual gettext files" as Weblate calls them.

More docs here: https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/formats/gettext.html#monolingual-gettext

[gforcada]

In the past I was helping translating GNOME to Catalan, and in the GNOME community they were using message ids and providing a default, but also context messages and translator comments: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/PO-Files.html

If weblate does not support them, then we have to find a solution around it :-/