[jbosstools-dev] ResourceBundle hygiene: help out the translators

Hi everyone, These are a few things that would really make the translators' jobs easier. (And mine, to some extent ;-) 1. Delete messages which are already obsolete: Please look at the apparently unused messages in this jira: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBIDE-4044 and help us work out if they are really unused, so that they can be removed. And if you know of any other messages (or entire properties files) which can be removed, that will help too! 2. Delete messages which become obsolete in future: When removing code which has (or might contain) externalised strings, please check whether you can delete the strings from the relevant properties files. This will save translators from translating text which will never be used! 3. Please *please* avoid concatenating externalised strings like messages.properties: InvalidFilename1=The filename ' InvalidFilename2=' is not valid. MyClass.java: setMessage(Messages.InvalidFilename1 + filename + Messages.InvalidFilename2); I'm not a translator, but I understand it's not possible to translate two half-sentences, jam them together with a variable in between, and have the result mean anything useful in most languages. Unless the two languages have the same word-order (eg English -> Pig Latin) the *sentence will break*. Instead, use a single string, passed though MessageFormat like this: messages.properties: InvalidFilename=The filename ''{0}'' is not valid. MyClass.java: setMessage(MessageFormat.format(Messages.InvalidFilename, fileName)); (Note that MessageFormat requires single quotes (apostrophes) to be repeated.) 4. If some of the strings in a .properties file aren't meant to be translated (eg an HTML template, or the text of a license agreement), adding NON-TRANSLATABLE comments will ensure that the string/strings aren't sent off for translation. For example: # START NON-TRANSLATABLE def_sc_js_html_content=<script type\="text/javascript">\n\t\n</script> # END NON-TRANSLATABLE If you have a whole block of non-translatable properties, you can just put # START NON-TRANSLATABLE before the first, and # END NON-TRANSLATABLE after the last. (And yes, you can nest NON-TRANSLATABLE blocks if you really want to.) http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Globalization_Guidelines#Non-translatable... Your help is appreciated! Thanks, Sean. PS I've updated http://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/JBossToolsCodingGuidelines with these points. -- Sean Flanigan Senior Software Engineer Engineering - Internationalisation Red Hat