Re: Patch to get rid of contractions in Nautilus strings

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 13:45 +0200, F Wolff wrote:
> Op Dinsdag 2008-04-01 skryf Cosimo Cecchi:
> > On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 12:29 +0200, Jorge González wrote:
> > 
> > > 40 new fuzzy strings, extra work for translators which is quite useless IMHO.
> > 
> > I'm sorry about this, but I posted a mail to this list on Saturday to
> > get comments before committing and the general consensus was positive,
> > so I went ahead.
> > 
> 
> I guess this consensus also came from people in languages with more
> translators where people can follow mailing lists all the time and
> comment within three days. I'm sure I'll get round to reviewing the
> Nautilus translation again in the next few years, so it's probably not
> as bad as the languages that had it translated but are currently not
> maintained. A third of my nautilus messages is already fuzzy, so in
> reality I lost less than 40 messages anyway.
> 
> My mail from Saturday doesn't seem to have made it to the list, so I'm
> still wondering why we couldn't automatically unfuzzy these or simply
> fix it in the PO files for English. Do we have any packages with bug
> fixes in an en.po? Just wondering if there's a policy about that.

Fixing things in the en.po files is not a good long-term
solution.  It's a good stop-gap to fix blatant errors late
in the release cycle.  But over time, the en.po translations
just make development harder, because developers will forget
which strings are changed in the en.po file.

> (To all the English speakers, sorry for the 7 contractions...)

Contractions are perfectly fine in informal communications.
Non-contracted forms are much more clear, especially for
contractions of the word "not" (which accounted for all of
the changes in Nautilus).

Of course, as with any guideline, there are exceptions.
There are times when the non-contracted form just sounds
really odd.  One example I can think of off the top of
my head is "What's New".  "What Is New" just sounds dumb.

--
Shaun