On Sat, 8 May 2004, Marcin Kasperski wrote:
> > One question: I don't read Polish, but: did you read the conventions for
> > error messages in HACKING? I think you introduced quite a number of newlines
> > in error messages. HACKING suggests to only do that in case absolutely
> > required (which is almost never :-)
>
> Polish sentences tend to be longer than their English equivalents. I
> tried to keep them short but not desperately (i.e. I preferred
> understandability to being short).
>
I think you should continue to prefer understandability. The problem is
that the error messages aren't only used in the cmdline client. Imagine
what happens in a GUI, where the window is larger (or smaller) than 80
columns.
IMO, the solution to this problem isn't to try to keep the error messages
to a certian length, but instead to teach the cmdline client to wrap lines
more intelligently. Even if you have an error message that is 40 chars
long, you might have a repository URL of 50 chars. I don't know if the
other developers want to go in that direction or just accept that we
sometimes have badly broken words.
We also have the problem with the command line help messages. In the
Swedish translation, I have option help strings something like:
msgid "help for some option"
msgstr "a longer Swedish help for some really"
" nice option"
This looks good on a terminal because the indentation is the same. I did
in this way and hope that the column with for options won't change
often... I think this is ugly, but less of a problem since these strings
are only used in the cmdline client.
BTW, Marcin, how do other programs that are translated into Polish solve
this problem for error messages? Do they normally use newlines thereby
"hardcode" the window with in the translation?
Regards,
//Peter
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Received on Sat May 8 19:12:59 2004