Re: i18n: Avoid sentence puzzles

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 30, 2012, 21:12 UTC
Message-ID: <CACBZZX6HiGNGEbvCF=Ba2BwUuJ09XFn56nMnF0SDt4T_7OyOhA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201201301231.21090.schwarzerf@gmail.com>

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 12:31, Frederik Schwarzer <schwarzerf@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> in order to enable translators to prepare proper translations,
> sentence puzzles have to be avoided. While it makes perfect sense for
> English, some languages may have to separate those words to sound or
> even be correct.
>
> The attached patch demonstrates a change to achive that. I did not
> test it because its purpose is only to raise awareness and start a
> discussion about this topic. After all the question is, how important
> translations are for a tool like Git. I have started a German
> translation but many things are really hard to translate.

I added the i18n support you're having problems with, and I completely agree that this is the sort of thing we need to do.

Unfortunately when I added the i18n support I didn't have time to get rid of all these sentence puzzles (or, to put it another way "lego" sentences). You should never force translators to translate partial sentences, you should always provide them with full sentences that they can translate completely, even if that means that there's some duplication for some languages.

Problem reports like this one are exactly what we need at this point for i18n, we need people spotting these issues, and then we can fix them.