Restricting search on one language
Is there some way to restrict search results on one specific language only. I noted recently that in the German localization, the English "for" has been translated sometimes directly, however often this preposition isn't best in the context and "of" makes more sense. I'd like to check the usages of "for", but with the search other languages are appearing as well.
I've requested this many times, but no such feature yet.
Until we get this feature, I use my web browser search tool to search the translation tool. This takes a while to set up, because I have to open all of the 'translated messages' in separate tabs (because of the maximum 2500 to a page limit), for both core messages and extensions of whatever project I am searching. Once the tabs are open, however, it is very easy to move from one result to another, and I see both the English and the translation without having to click on anything else (I search in Mozilla Firefox).
I do the same and it works well. The only problem is in searching all messages at translatewiki.net: we don't have a group for that.
To search all groups it's best to use search, but it's only feasible for uncommon words, otherwise you hit Evil's problem.
One nagging feature of search is that if we set search results to 500 (and use the browser to search for the language code), then change 10 messages so they no longer match the search, the next page of 500 results is shifted by 10. In other words, the 10 that should be at the top of the next page are not there; they've been moved to the previous page, that we just moved away from. So we'll miss them.
Another nagging feature is that it doesn't do partial matches. To replace a word completely, you need to search all its variations: singular, plural, masculine, feminine, present tense, past tense, future tense and combinations of those. It drives me NUTS! :) And I always miss some, of course.
Another suggestion I could make is that for the especially large groups, you make a gettext export and then check and correct in offline mode.
I know it's a bit late now, but the offline translation is really nice. Only in German, it's a bit complicated, because you also need to update de-formal, but other languages don't have something like this AFAIK.
Dutch and Hungarian also have and (in)formal variant. For Dutch (informal) it has been added to MediaWiki proper, for Hungarian that has not happened yet.
In general, each code has to be seen as indenpendant from any other; when a language has two localisations, that indeed means you have to handle two of them...