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Split up messages in diffutils.


From: Göran Uddeborg
Subject: Split up messages in diffutils.
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 16:43:00 +0100

When marking messages for translation, a recurring question is how
many strings to keep together.  If one splits things up in too small
pieces, it may become impossible to translate because context is lost.
On the other hand, it is easier and faster to translate small messages
than large chunks of text.  Using a travesty, I explain this by:
messages should be as small as possible, but no smaller.

In the case of diffutils, there are three messages which together make
up a sentence:


    #: src/cmp.c:177
    msgid "SKIP values may be followed by the following multiplicative 
suffixes:\n"

    #: src/cmp.c:178
    msgid "kB 1000, K 1024, MB 1,000,000, M 1,048,576,\n"

    #: src/cmp.c:179
    msgid "GB 1,000,000,000, G 1,073,741,824, and so on for T, P, E, Z, Y.\n"

Splitting up a single sentence is usually not a good idea.  While this
in this case didn't cause any problems in translating to Swedish, I
can imagine it would in other languages more distant from English.  So
I would recommend to make these three messages one single message
instead.



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