Bug 487318

Summary: Syntax information in a message is lost in the translation
Product: [Translations] i18n Reporter: Göran Uddeborg <goeran>
Component: svAssignee: stefan.asserhall
Status: REPORTED ---    
Severity: normal CC: bengan
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Fedora RPMs   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Göran Uddeborg 2024-05-21 11:39:30 UTC 
The string "Original Path;Deletion Date" in KIO (https://websvn.kde.org/trunk/l10n-kf6/sv/messages/kio/kio._json_.po?view=markup) is translated in Swedish to "Ursprunglig sökväg,Borttagsdatum". The semicolon is replaced with a comma, which might be correct if it was a complete message. In this case however it seems the semicolon is syntactic information separating what is two separate strings in a list in the original JSON. Replacing it with a comma makes them go together as one string in the translated JSON. The end result are error messages like this in the log.

maj 21 12:51:51 mimmi kde-open[3409631]: kf.kio.core: Malformed JSON protocol file for protocol: "trash" , number of the ExtraNames fields should match the number of ExtraTypes fields

It is quite unfortunate to put two separate strings together for the translation like this. It is a bit of a trap for the translator. Ideally, it should be two separate strings in the po file. If that is not technically feasible, at least the Swedish translation should be changed replacing the comma with a semicolon.
Comment 1 Bengt Gorden 2024-10-08 13:12:27 UTC 
Hej på er,

This has been bugging me for ages. My log files are getting clogged and when 6.6.0 was released I finally dug into it and found this bug report. It seems to be the same problem for Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Swedish and Polish. I have absolutely no idea where and how to do a PR and submit for KDE. I fixed it locally for myself on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but it won't cut it in the long run. It needs to be fixed upstream.