4.8 Letting Users Report Translation Bugs

Code sometimes has bugs, but translations sometimes have bugs too. The users need to be able to report them. Reporting translation bugs to the programmer or maintainer of a package is not very useful, since the maintainer must never change a translation, except on behalf of the translator. Hence the translation bugs must be reported to the translators.

Here is a way to organize this so that the maintainer does not need to forward translation bug reports, nor even keep a list of the addresses of the translators or their translation teams.

Every program has a place where is shows the bug report address. For GNU programs, it is the code which handles the “–help” option, typically in a function called “usage”. In this place, instruct the translator to add her own bug reporting address. For example, if that code has a statement

printf (_("Report bugs to <%s>.\n"), PACKAGE_BUGREPORT);

you can add some translator instructions like this:

/* TRANSLATORS: The placeholder indicates the bug-reporting address
   for this package.  Please add _another line_ saying
   "Report translation bugs to <...>\n" with the address for translation
   bugs (typically your translation team's web or email address).  */
printf (_("Report bugs to <%s>.\n"), PACKAGE_BUGREPORT);

These will be extracted by ‘xgettext’, leading to a .pot file that contains this:

#. TRANSLATORS: The placeholder indicates the bug-reporting address
#. for this package.  Please add _another line_ saying
#. "Report translation bugs to <...>\n" with the address for translation
#. bugs (typically your translation team's web or email address).
#: src/hello.c:178
#, c-format
msgid "Report bugs to <%s>.\n"
msgstr ""