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One, two, short, long
How do you translate the most quickly for the biggest impact. If you look at a
GUI application you will notice that most strings are relativelyt short. Menu
items are between one and three words long. Error messages are more
desctiptive at perhaps 5-10 words. So in general the items that users see in
normal operation are relatively short.
Therefore, if you can initialy focus your translation on the short strings then
you can make a quick visual impact. Following that with longer and longer
strings until the application is fully translated.
Shortcommings
The problem with this method is that you lose context in that you are not sure
in what situation the singel word string was used. Did "Manual" mean
"configure manually" or the "operations manual".
Using pogrep to select messages
Use pogrep to extract messages that are a certain number of words:
pogrep --search=msgid -e '^\w+(\s+\w+){0,3}$' -i templates/ -o short-words
This will extract between 1 and 4 words from the input.
Use the following regex's to extract specific word counts:
1: "^\w+$"
2: "^\w+\s+\w+$"
3: "^\w+(\s+\w+){2}$"
4: "^\w+(\s+\w+){4}$"
1-4: "^\w+(\s+\w+){0,4}$"
Example of impact
As an example Mozilla 1.7.3 contains 32217 words for translation. However,
breaking it down into words counts you get the following:
Words Word Count
1 1853
2 1774
3 1371
4 796
Or in total 5794 words.