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mrkara / gtranslator

A fork of the original 2-91 branch of Gtranslator from http://projects.gnome.org/gtranslator
GNU General Public License v3.0
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[bgo#631329] Misleading and unhelpful error messages #67

Open mrkara opened 7 years ago

mrkara commented 7 years ago

I used gtranslator for the first time today and stumbled across several issues that nearly made me cry, because I did not understand what the program wanted from me:

  1. I opened a .po file, translated one text and got:

    There is an error in the message: some header fields still have the initial default value

Several things to note here:

  1. This error has nothing to do with the "message" I just translated, because it refers to the file header

  2. What are header fields? As a translator, I don't know about that.

  3. If that's a problem, why didn't gtranslator open the header dialog instantly after opening the file?

  4. If 3. does not get implemented, there should be a better message like

    Header: Translation file problem Text: Please fix the file header first

  5. After fixing the header, I got:

    There is an error in the message: invalid plural expression

And again, some problems:

  1. There is again no problem with the message itself but my profile settings (as I see it, but that's a guess, because I could not get rid of the error message)

  2. Why didn't I get a validation error in the profile dialog?

  3. Why does gtranslator care about that when I don't need it?

  4. The program I want to translate provides a .pot (which is probably a .po template). I cannot open that with gtranslator, and gtranslator has no (or no for me obvious) way to generate a copy. Why isn't there a wizard or something that helps with that? Why do I get an empty application dialog and have to find out myself what to do now that I have started gtranslator?

Sorry if those bug is rude, but I've been programming for a decade now and I don't get gtranslator to work.

Originally reported by Christian Weiske at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631329

mrkara commented 7 years ago

yeah... gtranslator is far from easy in this sense :) Patches welcomed.

Originally posted by Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (nacho)