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Preparing files for translation

From: Lübbe Onken <l.onken_at_rac.de>
Date: 2004-04-20 14:51:15 CEST

Hi Folks,

thanks to Erik's hint I was able to extract the strings from the svn
sources. There are some things that I'd like to see improved however:

example 1) props.c lines 45/46
---SNIP---
svn_cl__revprop_no_rev_error (apr_pool_t *pool)
{
   return svn_error_create
     (SVN_ERR_CL_ARG_PARSING_ERROR, NULL,
      _("Must specify revision explicitly when operating on a "
        "revision property"));
}
---SNIP---
are extracted as two separate strings, which is hard to translate, since
the context might get lost.

Better:
---SNAP---
svn_cl__revprop_no_rev_error (apr_pool_t *pool)
{
   return svn_error_create
     (SVN_ERR_CL_ARG_PARSING_ERROR, NULL,
     _("Must specify revision explicitly when operating on a revision
property"));
}
---SNAP---
even though it might violate formatting guidelines.

Worse than the above example is the following
example 2) locks.c lines 276...
---SNIP---
return svn_error_createf
   (SVN_ERR_WC_BAD_PATH, NULL,
     _("Path '%s' ends in '%s', "
       "which is unsupported for this operation"),
     svn_path_local_style (path, pool), base_name);
---SNIP---
Same basic formatting problem, worse impact because this phrase might
become impossible to translate when its in two pieces. The placement of
the '%s' inside the phrase might be somewhere else in another language.

The order of verbs, nouns etc. inside a phrase is different in different
languages, so it could happen that a half sentence as above is
translatable in context with the other half. Maybe one of the two
snippets is reused somewhere else (looks good at a first glance), but it
requires the noun to be in a different place to make sense with its new
partner.

I don't know if xgettext has an option to glue these strings back
together, but I strongly suggest not to tear phrases apart in the first
place.

Cheers
-Lübbe

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Received on Tue Apr 20 14:53:08 2004

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