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

From: Martin Ågren <martin.agren@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 10, 2017, 18:14 UTC
Message-ID: <CAN0heSoetaKFsZ8b0kD5w=G4g3GJJHWwBzR9RreEQoaJz_YnTg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAEe2ifX5+OUOWw75pFZN86pT1iwYk2vb6u+uEMYLDpxYzmJLEQ@mail.gmail.com>

On 10 October 2017 at 04:35, Changwoo Ryu <cwryu@debian.org> wrote:

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

I thought Jean-Noël meant at least partially the translator-experience, not just the user-experience, but I might be wrong.

I prepared a patch to give a TRANSLATORS:-comment, but then I realized that we have more instances like this with `typename()`. Actually, quite often we avoid the issue (intentionally or unintentionally) by writing "of type %s", but other times, we do the "is a %s". So I don't know, maybe it all works anyway. The regular translators have now received 10 mails (11 counting this) so might be aware of this particular string by now. :-/

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> 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.

What you describe seems plausible, but I have to admit that I don't use i18n-ized software myself.

Martin