Re: [PATCH] submodule: avoid sentence-lego in translated string

From: Changwoo Ryu <cwryu@debian.org>
Date: Oct 10, 2017, 02:35 UTC
Message-ID: <CAEe2ifX5+OUOWw75pFZN86pT1iwYk2vb6u+uEMYLDpxYzmJLEQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7ew3rdxa.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

2017-10-10 10:26 GMT+09:00 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>:

Show 21 quoted lines

> Jean-Noël AVILA <jn.avila@free.fr> writes:
>
>> On Monday, 9 October 2017, 09:47:26 CEST Stefan Beller wrote:
>>
>>> I always assumed that translators are aware of these issues and sort of
>>> work around this somehow, maybe like this:
>>>
>>>   "submodule entry '%s' (%s) is not a commit. It is of type %s"
>>
>> Translators can be aware of the issue if the coder commented the
>> internationalization string with some possible candidates for the placeholders
>> when it is not clear unless you check in the source code. Much effort was
>> poured into translating the technical terms in other parts of Git; it seems
>> awkward to just step back in this occurence.
>
> I do not see this particular case as "stepping back", though.
>
> Our users do not spell "git cat-file -t commit v2.0^{commit}" with
> 'commit' translated to their language, right?  Shouldn't an error
> message output use the same phrase the input side requests users to
> use?

Users know the limit of command-line translation. They type "commit" to commit but they see translated "commit" in output messages. It is actually confusing. But the untranslated English literals in the middle of translated sentences does not remove the confusion but increase it in a different way.