Yes @nick I also have taught about this when I was implementing all the missing i18n tags. The point is indeed that word orders in sentences can change from language to language, and now we’ll get really weird sentences in some languages. So we need to find a way to be able to let them translate a complete sentence / paragraph.
Doing this will solve 2 problems:
- It will make the translators job easier, and allow them to translate a complete sentence/paragraph in a nice way.
- It will solve our problem we now have with characters such as spaces, ‘:’ and sentence ending characters.
Now we break up sentences when we have an html tag like a URL (a href) in our sentence. Other things like italic, bold and such can also happen. I don’t think it will be possible to do this without breaking the sentences up in code. But when we program the system that allows translators to translate on the website, they can maybe just translate the sentences and mark the special parts of the sentences (the parts that are bold, a link, etc… ).
I think this complete system needs to be automated both for the coders and the translators, to have a flexible system that supports the needs of the translators but doesn’t give the coders extra work.
EDIT
Now that I think about it. I don’t think this can only work if we only have to seperate strings for url’s. So we need to find a way to do things like bold and italic texts and things like that within the same sentence/paragraph.