Re: confusing string in divifund

[Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>]

On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 17:03 +0100, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
> 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.

I'd add something like "Also, breaking a message in smaller parts could
make harder for translators, who are not supposed to dig into the code,
to understand its meaning."

And also, if more experienced translators and grammar freaks (like me)
agree, 

 "As a rule of thumb, never break a sentence."

Claudio

-- 
Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra alumnos utalca cl>