Improve broken translation strings

[p2edwards]

Description

Ideally, each string we send to Transifex is a cohesive translatable unit, with enough context to translate it well.

We've fallen short on this ideal in a few places. Collect related PR's under this issue.

Things to improve

1. Fix strings that were missing from the build output entirely for some reason¹
2. Replace fragments like t('This is ') + isNot ? t('NOT') : t('') + t(' how we do it') with proper templating.²
3. Follow established or predictable conventions when it comes to field interpolation, links, or formatting; don't use HTML tags in translated strings.³
4. Stretch goal: Adopt a convention for providing more context in translations — visible to translators in transifex, but discarded from UI)⁴

Upcoming PR's

• PR to fix string concatenation in t() calls; Allow concat in frontend t()-string sources #4945
• PR to add a translation templating helper and fix some related fragment and web syntax related problems.

Footnotes

1. See "fix string concatenation", Allow concat in frontend t()-string sources #4945 ↩

2. Fragments like this arrive all out of order in Transifex and are not grammatically friendly.
   You can find instances of this by sorting the keys in extracted-strings.json and manually reading top to bottom, or applying regex.
   We're tracking some of these internally here (notion) and here (chat) ↩

3. Related: Standardize placeholders in translated strings #3651 ↩

4. See "Context in translations": xref (chat) ↩

[p2edwards]

Detecting issues sooner

Maybe we should consider un-ignoring extracted-strings.json at some point (at least on the frontend.)¹ I know it's abnormal to check in generated assets or build artifacts,² but one upside is we'd be more likely to spot potential translation issues earlier, like during code review.

Footnotes

1. If we do this to make spot-checking easier then we should sort the output by key, and maybe simplify from json {"key":"key"} to array ["key"] format, or plaintext, one per line with escaped \n's. ↩

2. This might be a different idea but it sounds related: Put the language MO files inside this repository (?) #4801 ↩