Re: Construction sentences with embedded widgets (was: String changes in gnome-keyring)

[John Barstow <jbowtie amathaine com>]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Wouter Bolsterlee <wbolster gnome org> wrote:
> Op zaterdag 28-08-2010 om 20:40 uur [tijdzone -0500], schreef Stef
> Walter:
>> The following strings were added:
>> "Forget this password if idle for"
>> "Forget this password after"
>> "Forget this password when I log out"
>
> I'm not sure strings like this work for any language. It's quite clear
> that there is a missing "%s" in the first two sentences, and I assume
> that is because there is no string substitution performed in this case.
> Instead, an actual widget is shown.
>
> I'm not sure what the correct approach would be in this case. I'm not
> even sure there are languages that really *require* text both before and
> after the position of the widget.
>

Of course there are such languages; off the top of my head both Arabic
and Latin require the verb to come at the end of the sentence. If you
wanted things to make sense in Latin you'd probably also need to
change the declension of the nouns in the widget based on the
preposition used in the sentence (in this example it would be
accusative because we're talking about duration, but I can easily
imagine cases where it would be nominative or dative).