Translation helper function

[imajit]

Regarding #7798
The reason why the UI breaks sometimes while using the Translation function is because the function returns 2 different types of outputs: a translation of the string if is present and if not, a HTML tag redirecting user to the string to be translated on transifex site.
But in this issue, the translation function was called inside a HTML tag

plots2/app/views/layouts/_header.html.erb

Line 20 in 3450fdf

<input aria-label="Enter Search Query" type="text" id="searchform_input" class="form-control search-query typeahead" role="search" qryType="tags" placeholder="<%= t('layout._header.search') %>" value="<%= params[:query] %>" required>

placeholder="<%= t('layout._header.search') %>" so it could not be rendered. There might be other similar cases where translation function is called inside a HTML tag.
We can try to find all such tags and either change them or just not call the function in such cases.But most of the times these issues are taken up by first time contributors and chances are they might not be aware about this. The other issue with using the translation function is it renders the globe icon way too many times on the same page.

Also these globe icons are quick links to strings on transifex site to members of the translation team and not are not visible to other users. I have one suggestion to this , we can have a button or notification visible on the dashboard that redirects users to https://publiclab.org/wiki/translation and for members of Translation team to https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/languages/ instead of the using translation function.

I'm a bit confused on how to move forward with this and would love to hear your suggestions on it

[jywarren]

OK, this is really great, @imajit -- so my thoughts are:

1. But in this issue, the translation function was called inside a HTML tag - so, can we get the helper function to know that it's inside of HTML? I could imagine either a) that it somehow "looks ahead and behind" (which sounds hard and easy to get wrong), b) that we add a parameter like html: true so it doesn't try to splice in more HTML, or c) that we pass in a longer segment with the replace-able section somewhere in the middle, so it can assess if there's HTML surrounding it... i guess i think b) sounds the most promising, huh?
2. to members of the translation team and not are not visible to other us - if you read the history of this project, maybe in Planning issue for translation/internationalization/localization systems #3262 ? we wanted to recruit people to be translators, and we thought we should show lots of translation prompts (still max 5?) to these people, but only perhaps 1 per page to "regular" users. That way we can still use missing translations as a moment to recruit translators, but once you're a translator, you're seeing more prompts to finish it. Does this make sense? I love the idea of advertising this in more places however, and we might need input from @publiclab/community-reps to know if a button or notification visible on the dashboard is a good place to recruit translators, or if another place would be best?

Thanks, I hope this helped!