4.6 Adding advice for translators

Sometimes you might want to add advice for the translators to a particular message. For example:

• The translatable string might be decent English but nevertheless ambiguous.
• The translatable string refers to something in English culture (such as a film’s name) that is different in other cultures.
• The translator should make an adjustment that is specific to her locale.

The way to do this is to add comments, before the gettext invocation or inside the gettext invocation but before the string, that start with the substring ‘TRANSLATORS:’. These comments will be extracted into the POT file, so that translators can see them. For example, when you write

/* TRANSLATORS: This is an English idiom,
   meaning not to reveal a secret. */
puts (gettext ("Don't spill the beans!"));

the POT file will contain:

#. TRANSLATORS: This is an English idiom,
#. meaning not to reveal a secret.
#: source.c:213
msgid "Don't spill the beans!"
msgstr ""

and the translators will be shown the advice in a particular place in their translation tool.

Only comments that immediately precede the gettext invocation or the translatable string are considered. Intervening blank lines are OK, but if there is other code between the comment and the translatable string, the comment no longer applies.

Note: The string TRANSLATORS: is a convention, enabled by the Makefile.in.in file that is part of a package’s build system. It is not enabled by default in xgettext. If you are using xgettext without the Makefile.in.in infrastructure, you will need to pass the option --add-comments=TRANSLATORS: yourself.