Re: bug 551859 - translating aisleriot card movement hints

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

Hi

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Vincent Povirk <madewokherd gmail com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> I am not subscribed to this list, so please CC me on replies.

I think the third category can be avoided.

Was there any reason not to follow Andre Klapper's suggestion from the
bugzilla link?

Regards
Ask