msgmerge dreaming up translations for new messages?

[yohcop]

Hi,

I just sent a pull request, with only a clean msgmerge --update command.

However, I see a handful of translations that seems to be completely invented. I added comments to my PR, in order to try to understand what's going on, or what I may be doing wrong.

#918

All I did, was

$ MDBOOK_OUTPUT='{"xgettext": {"pot-file": "messages.pot"}}'   mdbook build -d po
$ msgmerge --update po/fr.po po/messages.pot 

And in the diffs, I see things like:

#: src/SUMMARY.md:243
#, fuzzy
msgid "Exceptions"
msgstr "Fonctions"

Where does the "Fonctions" string come from? I can't even see it in the previous version of the file?

Thanks,

[mgeisler]

Hey @yohcop,

Great question, thanks for asking this! I wrote up a bunch about it here before seeing your question.

In short, msgmerge is trying hard to preserve existing translations — I don't know precisely how it does this and it seems like it can be pretty creative in how it does this 😄 When it guesses, it marks the entry with fuzzy, which indicates that a human should proof-read it. We don't use fuzzy entries at all when rendering the book, so it's important to clear out those fields later (probably a second PR, though I would combine it when the course is fully translated).

(cc @henrif75: more translation questions)