[Po4a-devel] XML: prevent some attributes from being translated

[Nicolas François]

Hi,

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 07:55:45PM +0100, poy at 123gen.com wrote:
> 
> example: the text "abc <a href=\"file.html\" target=\"_blank\" 
> title=\"link-name\"> def". as of now, the text appears as is in the .pot 
> file, and if a translator mistakenly translates \"file.html\" into 
> \"translated_name.html\", then the link will point to a non-existing page.
> when a translator translates that text to "abc_translated <a 
> href=\"file_translated.html\" target=\"wrong_target\" 
> title=\"link-name_translated\"> def_translated", i would like modifications 
> to the "href" and "target" attributes to be ignored. or as an alternative 
> solution, simply exit po4a with an error stating that the translation file 
> is incorrect.
> 
> i assume there is no current way of doing it; i could try, but i don't know 
> Perl much and even less po4a. i have noticed the recent work on the XHTML 
> module (thanks for <br> and <u>, much appreciated!), so i was hoping a po4a 
> maintainer could give this a try.
> otherwise, i would like pointers on where to start...

No, there are currently no way to do this.

In the next version, I would like to add "placeholder" tags.

In that case, it should be possible to po4a to generate such PO files:

msgid "abc_translated <placeholder a_1/> def_translated"
msgstr ""

msgid "content of the link"
msgstr ""

If the placeholder tag is specified as untranslatable, that should also do
the trick for you.

With the current version, the only think you can do is to execute some
scripts on the translation to check that translators did not change the
content of the links.

Best Regards,
-- 
Nekral