As part of the video work currently in progress we’re going to be abstracting a  bunch of strings away from “Music” or “Track” to things like “Item” or “Media”. It’s going to be scores of strings most likely (we’re still figuring it out over in bug 18105) and will have an impact on translators. Specifically many translated strings will need to be checked and adjusted to make sense in the new world of audio and video.

One of the hard parts about doing translations for Songbird is that if we change a source string there isn’t a way to know about it in the translate site. One of the requests we got from translators when stevel and mook went to EU Mozcamp 2009 was to change key names when we change source strings so they know when to update their translations. This is one approach to fix the problem but means we would have multiple entries in our database for effectively the same text (arguably most changes to source strings would be minor and not change the overarching message).

To avoid needless duplication of strings in the database we’re opting to not change the key names. However, we heard the request from the community and we’re going to address the real need. Namely, we’re going to add functionality to the translate site that allows a translator to filter to just the strings that have been modified since the last translation was made (see bug 18795). It will lag a little behind the landing of the modified strings but once landed should be backward compatible to any old changes that need addressing.

This change won’t affect the percentage of ‘untranslated’ strings, and therefore won’t affect a language’s inclusion into the language bundle that gets served up during firstrun or in the File menu.