As you may know, Inkscape strings are facing a small problem : at the moment, the string _"H" is used in different contexts: as an abbreviation for Hue and for Height (see my clumsy patch proposal : http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1203796&gro...)
After taking a look at different mailing list and at Inkscape's wiki, it appears that the wiki links offers some good indications (cool).
See http://www.gtkmm.org/gtkmm2/docs/tutorial/html/ch20s03.html in "Same strings, different semantics" But the solution suggested (adding some extra characters) is not really welcome.
A much better approach can be foud here : http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html in "Don't use too short messages".
So if you are OK with it, I'd be very interested at: - first improve the current state with short strings (XYWH, RGB, RGBA, HSV...): my plan would be creating some xywh_string = _"XYWH", rgb_string = _"RGB"... strings that would be translatable and then pick from those strings in the code replace H by xywh_string[4] or hsv_string[3] depending on the context - then improve our conformance against gnome HIG with : - increase the use of plural syntax (see "Plurals" in gnome-i18n) - improve the way Inkscape manages marked up string (see "Avoid markup wherever possible" in gnome-i18n)
It would be a good opportunity for me improving my understanding of the code of Inkscape without the hazard of breaking everything.
Regards,
Matiphas