"Desktop" string is not translated in KDE

[Andrius Štikonas]

"Desktop settings" string should be translated in KDE (see screenshot). The word "Desktop" comes from /usr/share/kde4/services/plasma-containment-desktop.desktop file from plasma-desktop but for some reason "Desktop" is not translated.

The string is of course translated upstream and can also be found in launchpad: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+source/kdebase-workspace/+pots/desktop-kdebase-workspace/lt/+translate?search=&show=all&start=646

All other plasmoids and containments are correctly translated, this happens only with Desktop containment.

I tested this with Lithuanian, Russian and German languages, so it probably happens with all languages.

[Felix Geyer (debfx)]

For some reason gettext fails to load strings from the desktop_* templates:

$ LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 gettext desktop_kdebase-workspace "Free Space Notifier"
Free Space Notifier

Other templates work:

$ LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 gettext plasmagenericshell "All Widgets"
Alle Miniprogramme

/usr/share/locale-langpack/de/LC_MESSAGES/desktop_kdebase-workspace.mo seems to contain the translation for "Free Space Notifier"" : "Speicherplatzbenachrichtigung".

[David Planella (dpm)]

One thing that comes to mind is that perhaps the application does not set the right translation domain when initializing gettext, but it seems that gettext does _not_ load the translations itself.

Could it be that kdelibs does not recognize the X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain when loading the .desktop file translations (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/Internationalisation/Packaging#Desktop%20Entries).

That would not explain why plain gettext fails loading the translations, though

[Felix Geyer (debfx)]

The problem is that the translations of the desktop file entries have different gettext contexts:

1) context = [key name] (Name, GenericName, ...)

2) context = [key name]|[additional sting]

With this .desktop file the context is "Name|plasma containment":
[Desktop Entry]
# ctxt: plasma containment
Name=Desktop

3) no context

Currently we only lookup 1).

To solve this bug we need to parse the "# ctxt:" comment and figure out a way to check if a lookup failed.

[Felix Geyer (debfx)]

In natty kde4libs tries 1) and falls back to 3) if the translated string is equal to the original (English) string which usually means that the lookup failed.

We still need to parse the context 2) which probably means scanning the desktop file line by line for the ctxt comment.

[Felix Geyer (debfx)]

We have decided to stop stripping translations from desktop files, see https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-devel/2011-September/thread.html#5464