Re: confusing string in divifund

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

Στις 26-07-2007, ημέρα Πεμ, και ώρα 10:32 -0400, ο/η Claudio Saavedra
έγραψε:
> On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 13:05 +0100, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> > "From your budget and the amount you've already spent, you will need
> > to
> > have saved" 150 euros.
> > 
> > It may be an issue for some languages that the object is not always at
> > the end of the sentence. 
> 
> It is an issue. At least in German (if I still remember German grammar)
> it's tricky to translate.
> 
> Looking the code it seems the complete sentence is something like
> 
>         "From your budget and the amount you've already spent, you will
>         need to have saved %s by the date %s" ,
>         
> so it's even trickier.
> 
> Instead of trying to be as creative as possible in order to translate
> such unfriendly strings, you should file bugs. I've done this in the
> past a couple of times, developers have always been friendly and fixed
> the issues.

This is a good example to try to suggest here how it should be tackled,
then document on live.gnome.org for developers to reference.
Please be constructive on the following:


Let's assume that we have the following message and we want to make it
possible to translate in different languages, including languages that
follow a different order from "subject verb object".

"From your budget and the amount you've already spent, you will need to
have saved %s by the date %s"

In this case we can use "positional arguments" as described in 
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#c_002dformat

The above message is then converted in the source code to 

"From your budget and the amount you've already spent, you will need to
have saved %1$s by the date %2$s"

Another example is 
from
"You run for %d minutes along the %s route with team %s."
to
"You run for %1$d minutes along the %2$s route with team %3$s."

Sometimes it is good to break messages in smaller parts. However, in
this example it is better to leave as a single message, due to the
sentence structure.


How does that look like?

Simos Xenitellis