Please add translator comments to inform about maximum length of top level GUI strings

[TLE]

At the top level of the settings in unity-control-center it seems that the text below the buttons easily runs out of space in more long winded languages (that tend to oncatenate words) like e.g. Danish or German.

This has let e.g. to this bug report against the Danish translation: https://bugs.launchpad.net/fjel/+bug/1371908

But really, without any information about how much space is available or how to write the strings to make then wrap (e.g. will they wrap at a '-') it is difficult make them right without first seeing them fail.

So, could you please add translator comments to all strings at the top level, where this is the case, that describes roughly how much space is present and how to make words warp.

Thanks in advance.

[TLE (k-nielsen81)]

Screenshot to illustrate the problem

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Ask Hjorth Larsen (askhl)]

Unfortunately, adding translator comments is not quite sufficient. If it were only that simple, I would submit a patch. And it has been two years now, counting this bug report.

The problem is that unity-control-center somehow gets several strings (usually titles) from /other/ programs such as deja-dup, language-selector, and undoubtedly many more. It is very time consuming for translators to figure out where these problematic strings come from, and it is not even a solution to fix it in the other program: If we add a hyphen in "Sikkerhedskopier" ("Backups"), so it becomes "Sikkerheds-kopier", then it will be correct in the control center but wrong /everywhere/ else in Deja-dup, and that string is used in very many places where the hyphen would introduce an error.

Since unity-control-center does not handle long strings well, it is unity-control-center's fault. It must define its /own/ strings and have proper translator comments so the translators know where to place hyphens. And probably it should allow longer strings, too, and do linebreaks automatically. Even in the middle of the words if it needs to, because ugly is better than absent. Now it simply refrains from rendering the whole string.

This has been broken in many languages for years, and it's a really basic part of the UI which every user sees, so this is a serious internationalization problem. Please, I implore, give it the priority it deserves.