Re: [Nano-devel] Don't split sentence in nano

[Jordi Mallach]

On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 10:55:01AM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Never split sentences in several gettext calls. This splits the sentence
> into several messages, and a sentence can only be properly translated in
> its entirety, since word order, proper terminology and grammar vary a
> lot between languages. Unfortunately, it's too common to see something
> like these frightening fictual examples in the source code:
> 
> Remember that each and every call to _() will result in a message that
> can end up at any place and in any order in the po file. " frobnicators
> available." and "There are " won't make much sense for themselves and
> can easily be accidentally mistranslated when out of context. Even
> though these messages may look suspicious, putting together this puzzle
> of which message belongs to which other one is a form of source code
> reverse engineering that most translators don't want to spend time on.
> Even worse, sometimes these splitups make proper translation not only
> extremely difficult but even impossible. This can be the case if the
> splitup results in the same sentence fragments used in several places
> but the words need different tenses or gender in the different cases,
> which may not be the case in English.

Christian is 100% correct here (and his other requests, too).
I quickly fixed it, but I wonder if the current state of -p is
nice enough.

This will show the warning about the behaviour change every single time
users start nano (if they choose to start it with -p), which can end up
being extremely annoying and repetitive in May of 2004.

When Mutt changes major behaviour, they simply note it in the major
release announcement, and perhaps a special document like "UPGRADE",
where they say what options changed meaning or where added/removed from
1.0 -> 1.2, from 1.2 -> 1.4, etc.

What do others think? I can quickly scribble an UPGRADE file for us.

Patch attached, anyway.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
address@hidden     address@hidden     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/~jordi/

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