Re: [Synaptic-devel] Re: Typo

[Michael Vogt]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 08:02:40PM +0100, Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
> Therefore, a %s placeholder should never be used to build a "programmed" 
> sentence. For example the string "I am very %s" where %s is "happy" or 
> "unhappy" is typically wrong.
> 
> Because the computer does not know grammar in every language and never will.
> 
> Now, when translating "<b>Warning:</b> %d essential %s will be removed\n" 
> into 
> German, you cannot simply replace %s with der "package" or "packages" because 
> the adjective "essential" needs to be singular or plural. Boom!

Thanks to your input a while ago, I was able to get rid of most of
this kind of sentences. Some have slipped through. I'm happy that you
help finding the last bad phrases :)
 
IMHO we should fix the above string even though we are in string
freeze. As Jean-Michel pointed out, we can't translate this into
german for example (and propably lots of other languages). If that is
ok with the rest of you, I'll commit a fix for this today. 

> For the same reasons, I doubt that the half sentence "but it is to be 
> installable" is translatable into Asian languages. Same as with "package is 
> not installable" should be "Package %s is not installable." or the like.

Yeah, this is indeed another bad example. This code was ported from
apt-get, I wonder how the managed to translate it :) The problem is
that this is a rather difficult piece of code and it's pretty hard to
make this one huge string. But I'll clean it up as soon as I
can. Fortuneatly the message isn't shown often. It's a diagnostic
message that will be displayed if a package can't be installed for
some reason (usually because of broken dependencies). 

> After release, this would be a good idea to fix all these half sentences. 
> Synaptic is one of the most promissing software in GNU/Linux. All its strings 
> need to be translatable.

Thanks a lot for the kudos :) 

We'll fix all of those issues (and a lot of them have already be
fixed). Thanks a lot for your help identifing them!
 
bye,
 Michael
-- 
Linux is not The Answer. Yes is the answer. Linux is The Question. - Neo