Several strings are limited in length. This means they should not exceed 65 characters for single-width character languages and 32 characters for double-width character languages such as CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) and similar languages.

This constraint may be checked by the scripts/l10n/choices-check.pl script from the Debian Installer development tree:

scripts/l10n/choices-check.pl < packages/po/<sublevelX>/<language>.po

This script will output the offending line(s) number(s) as well as the number of characters in this/these line(s).

This entry is the language selection screen entry for each language. Translators can translate it, but they should keep “Choose language” in English as an alternative, so that users mistakenly choosing a language can still find the appropriate entry to change it back to their own language.

Most Debian Installer packages have a main menu entry, which is the text that appears in the Debian Installer main menu to allow users to select the corresponding action.

The length of this main menu entry is limited to 58 columns, i.e. 58 characters for single-width languages and only 29 characters for double-width languages. These main menu entries all have a comment with “Main menu item” in the PO and POT files.

Many places in Debian Installer use variables (e.g. like in “${LOCALE} is currently not supported in Debian”). The variable names should not be translated and be kept inside braces prepended by the dollar sign in the translation.

This constraint is checked by the spell checking scripts, which report these errors separately (see Chapter 7, Translations spellchecking for details about the spell checking scripts).

Advanced translation software such as lokalize are able to visually display such errors and warn about them before saving files.

Several entries in PO files are unsplit choices lists such as:

#. Type: select
#. Choices
#: ../netcfg-common.templates:124
msgid "Infrastructure (Managed) network, Ad-hoc network (Peer to peer)"
msgstr ""

For these translations, translators should take care of separating all choices with a normal comma sign, even if commas are not used in their language. Only standard commas should be used and not special commas such as those used by the Arabic language.

Commas should not be used inside individual choices unless they are properly escaped with a backslash (\) character:

For instance, the following is incorrect:

#. Type: select
#. Choices
#: ../netcfg-common.templates:124
msgid "Infrastructure (Managed) network, Ad-hoc network (Peer to peer)"
msgstr "Infrastructure network, also called Managed, Ad-hoc network, or peer to peer"

While this is correct:

#. Type: select
#. Choices
#: ../netcfg-common.templates:124
msgid "Infrastructure (Managed) network, Ad-hoc network (Peer to peer)"
msgstr "Infrastructure network\, also called Managed, Ad-hoc network\, or peer to peer"

Such errors are detected by the spellchecker scripts (see Chapter 7, Translations spellchecking).

A special string from the choose-mirror package is intended to setup the default Debian archive mirror country, depending on the language. Translators should put there the ISO-3166 code of the country to be used as default, most often their own country name, or the country their language is spoken in. For instance, the Brazilian Portuguese translator will use “BR” as translation there, as this is the ISO-3166 code for Brazil.

Such errors are detected by the spellchecker scripts (see Chapter 7, Translations spellchecking).

A few entries in the partman are limited to 8 symbols only. Translators must be VERY careful about not exceeding this value, otherwise, the display in the partman screens will be badly broken.