Mistranslated BiDi Brackets

0-mistranslated-bidi-brackets.md

My team got a bug report (bsc#1127563) about misplaced brackets in Arabic translation:

Looking at the first problematic line, "Total System Memory", notice that the Arabic translation has both square brackets in the right-hand version. Let's check the corresponding translations file.

At the first sight we see a matching left+right bracket, but that is misleading, since they are not in the correct place. The GitHub rendering of that line is confused by the msgstr prefix, which incorrectly sets the line up for Left-to-Right rendering.

I find it best to diagnose problems with bidirectional text by displaying each character on a separate line, so I set up a simple web application for it. See how the bidi-debugger tool displays this translation:

m
s
g
s
t
r

"
إ
ج
م
ا
ل
ي

[...]

]
م
ي
ج
ا
ب
ا
ي
ت
]
:
"

Now we have a proof that the error is in the translated text. Likely the translator got confused by a tool that used the wrong directionality, like the GitHub rendering above.

Tools that handle translations of bidirectional text correctly, by showing the translation alone (without the msgstr prefix):

• Weblate, for example its openSUSE instance
• Emacs po-mode

brackets.png

kdump-po-total-system-memory.png