Re: quoting in gnulib

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

> Is it true that if some environment variable (LANG?) is set to
> something (e.g., fr_FR?) that a "translation" of ` and ' will be
> used?

Yes.

> Looking at quotearg.h, it seems so.  Do any translations in
> fact do this?

Yes.  For example, coreutils/po/de.po contains this:

  #: lib/quotearg.c:240
  msgid "`"
  msgstr "„"

  #: lib/quotearg.c:241
  msgid "'"
  msgstr "“"

(pardon the non-ASCII chars), which I trust are the proper quote marks
for German.

However, I just checked the translations for coreutils and got the
following depressing statistics.

Coreutils has 36 translations.

Of them, 21 do not translate ` and ', which indicates that either the
translators don't understand the convention or they can't think of
anything better than ` and ' in their encodings either.

6 transliterate ` and ' both to the same string, which seems
even worse:

  4 translate both to "

    bg fi gl sv

  da translates both to '

  ms translates both to `

  2 translate both to the empty string.  Ouch!:

    no pt

The following 7 translations use nice-looking quotes for their
languages:

ca de es nb sl zh_CH zh_TW

7 out of 34 is not a very good batting average.  Perhaps if we start
recommending the quote module, things will improve; but I guess we
shouldn't pretend everything will look nice right away.