The translation process could use some better context

[joepie91]

I've been working on adding/reviewing/fixing the Dutch translation of Godot recently, and there are a couple issues that I keep running into regularly:

• All source references on Weblate point to line 0, and currently a lot of these references are dead entirely seemingly because some files were moved around(?). This means that a lot of source lookup requires manually finding the relevant file in Github's file search, and then text-searching through sometimes very large source files to find the specific instance. And this source lookup is important because...
• Translatable strings are not accompanied by a context signal. It is often hard or impossible to tell whether a given string is a button label, a tooltip text, an accessibility string, an error message, a dropdown option, or something else entirely. In some cases it's not even clear what part of the engine it refers to; for example, anything in the debugger panel originates from the same few source files, regardless of which tab (and therefore topic) the translation applies to. This context matters because different contexts often require different language forms, involve different length constraints, use entirely different words, and so on.
• In some cases, the same string (especially short ones) is used across multiple contexts where the semantic meaning is different entirely, just because the string happens to be identical. One example I ran across is 'constant', which is used to describe both the language item and a constant rate of change, but those concepts translate differently.

I'm not certain of the capabilities of the localization system used, or those of Weblate, but it would be very helpful if the strings in the source had some kind of 'context label' that would show up on Weblate and that could also differentiate identical strings between contexts.

Fixing the source links to point at a specific line would be helpful in the short term to determine the context of a string, as I assume that context-labelling all source strings would be a fair amount of work and not something that's done overnight.

[Calinou]

I'm not certain of the capabilities of the localization system used, or those of Weblate, but it would be very helpful if the strings in the source had some kind of 'context label' that would show up on Weblate and that could also differentiate identical strings between contexts.

Translation contexts are already used in some places, but they're not always used to the point they would refer to labels and buttons differently. (I have yet to see that approach in an open source project myself, at least those using gettext-based translations where the source string is the English string.)

However, it makes sense to use contexts when the same word is used with different meanings. We already do this for "Project Manager", which can refer to the program that appears before the editor or the job title in the About dialog. For the missing "constant" context, I would open an issue on the main Godot repository about it.

[timothyqiu]

All source references on Weblate point to line 0, and currently a lot of these references are dead entirely seemingly because some files were moved around(?).

The line numbers are removed intentionally to avoid recording unnecessary changes that bloats the git repository.