bug 551859 - translating aisleriot card movement hints

[Vincent Povirk <madewokherd gmail com>]

Ihar Hrachyshka has revived the discussion on
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=551859, which is a bug
about how we can't properly translate sentences like "Move the Ace of
Hearts onto the Queen of Spades."

In order to avoid having  54 times 54 strings for this, we substitute
the individual card names into something like "Move %s onto %s." I
understand that in many languages a different string is required for
the first and second value, so this doesn't work.

The way I'm currently planning to fix it, we would have the following
kinds of strings:

* "the Ace of Hearts"
* "Move %s onto the Queen of Spades."
* "Move the Ace of Hearts onto an empty foundation slot."

There would be 54 of the first and second kind. There would probably
be more than a hundred and less than a thousand of the third kind,
depending on how many non-card things we need to generate hints for
moving specific cards to. Card name strings would only be substituted
into those 54 sentences for moving onto a specific card.

If I get no response here (which I'm sort of expecting), that is what
I will do. I'll be doing my work on the master branch as strings are
frozen in 3.2.

Is creating one string for each combination of cards actually better,
in spite of my instincts that tell me not to do that?

Is there some other solution that gives translators more flexibility
without creating more strings?

I get the impression that msgctxt would make the strings shorter but
not actually reduce their number, and since I do not know how to set
up msgctxt properly for use in scheme code I figure it's better to
ignore it so I can make progress.

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