Immediate automatic proofreading custom rules

[rillig]

Last week I used Poedit to proofread a translation that had been done by someone else. There were many technical terms in the translation, and I thought it would be nice if they were all translated in the same way. Similarly for the structure of some sentences.

So I wrote a quick and dirty program to do some of the most obvious checks. Up to now it just matches the source string and the target string against regular expressions. But even this is already useful.

My idea is that Poedit could support such an automatic checker and then mark the messages directly in the UI, like it already does for fuzzy messages. The rule sets should be configurable, and it should be possible to import and export them.

The benefit of having this feature in Poedit would be that the translator gets direct and immediate feedback on the translation, so that the proofreader can concentrate on the more interesting cases.

Use cases:

• check for typical false friends (en:fast != de:fast)
• other typical wrong translations that happen in the domain
• consistent use of terms (e.g. en:settings => de:Voreinstellungen, de:Einstellungen, de:Vorgaben, de:Optionen)
• whitespace at the beginning or end of a message
• forbidden words (e.g. too colloquial)