Gettextization and scenario dialogs

[sanna]

A small proposal
While menu items and other such can be expected to remain relatively stable, dialogs seems prone to modification and additions.

It is also difficult for translators to translate such out of context; f ex it is virtually impossible to translate What do you want? w/o knowledge if you refers to a single individual or to several. The current scheme seems to lump all What do you want? together and then it's up to maintainers to identify which of these are singular and which are plural, and prefix them accordingly. This seems to me to be too daunting a task for anybody to willingly undertake.

While the number of phrases that needs to be prefixed in other parts of the game probably will remain small, there is just no way of knowing how many such problems may arise with the dialogs.

I was wondering if it might not be recommendable/possible to automatically prefix all [message]:s with the message-id, so that the translators can keep the freedom to vary the translation of a dialog string to keep a natural flow in the dialog. It will mean that translators will have to translate What do you want? once for every occurence.

I know that there have been some talk of establishing separate textdomains for at least 3d party campaigns, but that will not solve this problem, since you can easily have What do you want? in both senses in one single scenario.

[Viliam]

I was wondering if it might not be recommendable/possible to automatically prefix all [message]:s with the message-id, so that the translators can keep the freedom to vary the translation of a dialog string to keep a natural flow in the dialog. It will mean that translators will have to translate What do you want? once for every occurence.

So the string-id in PO file should be like this:
"level5string10^What do you want?"

[sanna]

So the string-id in PO file should be like this:
"level5string10^What do you want?"

Something like that, however, with the recent split up of po-files into separate textdomains, the problem is MUCH smaller than before.
I guess that a script modification that explicitly disallows identical strings within the campaign textdomains would remove all but a minute amount of difficult strings.

Note, doublets must be allowed in the domain containing the units, due to the way weapon names are handled.