Re: [PATCH] l10n: de.po: translate 5 messages

Ralf Thielow <ralf.thielow@gmail.com> writes:

The changes look good to me. The following is purely about the original English messages.

This results from Peff's c17592a (commit: tweak empty cherry pick advice for sequencer, 2013-07-26):

  diff --git a/builtin/commit.c b/builtin/commit.c
  index a17a5df..39717d5 100644
  --- a/builtin/commit.c
  +++ b/builtin/commit.c
  @@ -62,8 +62,18 @@
   "If you wish to commit it anyway, use:\n"
   "\n"
   "    git commit --allow-empty\n"
  +"\n");
  +
  +static const char empty_cherry_pick_advice_single[] =
  +N_("Otherwise, please use 'git reset'\n");
  +
  +static const char empty_cherry_pick_advice_multi[] =
  +N_("If you wish to skip this commit, use:\n"
   "\n"
  -"Otherwise, please use 'git reset'\n");
  +"    git reset\n"
  +"\n"
  +"Then \"git cherry-pick --continue\" will resume cherry-picking\n"
  +"the remaining commits.\n");
   
   static const char *use_message_buffer;
   static const char commit_editmsg[] = "COMMIT_EDITMSG";

I was wondering for a while if this was a smart move, based on the usual observation that it is better to translate things in one chunk because many languages have more interdependencies than English does. The gettext manual says:

     puts ("Apollo 13 scenario: Stack overflow handling failed.");
     puts ("On the next stack overflow we will crash!!!");

  Should these two statements merged into a single one? I would recommend
  to merge them if the two sentences are related to each other, because
  then it makes it easier for the translator to understand and translate
  both.  On the other hand, if one of the two messages is a stereotypic
  one, occurring in other places as well, you will do a favour to the
  translator by not merging the two.
[...]
     Translatable strings should be limited to one paragraph; don't let a
  single message be longer than ten lines.

So it seems that concatenating sentences indeed falls into a gray area between "avoid sentence lego" and "split at paragraphs". And Peff's style of splitting it saves the translators work because the first part of the message is shared among two code paths.