Re: [L10N] Kickoff of translation for Git 2.10.0 round 1

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 20, 2016, 18:03 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqy43rxqqz.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <9262712.D6TC1VHfMN@cayenne>

Jean-Noël AVILA <jn.avila@free.fr> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 1.  In config.c, the changes to the function die_bad_number tried to flatten the 
> translated strings (no message building logic). I think it went too far, and 
> the reason of the failure can be factorized so that we don't have to 
> retranslate each time. I might be wrong on this one, but I have no example of 
> language where we would need differentiated error reasons.

I do not have a strong opinion on this one. I think it is an attempt to avoid language-lego.

> 2.  in sequencer.c, there is a mistake in the original string to translate 
> "Cannot revert during a another revert"

This should be corrected. Thanks for spotting.

> 3. git-rebase--interactive, in this_nth_commit_message and 
> skip_nth_commit_message are not localizable,

As the "TRANSLATORS" comment alludes to, "This is the Nth thing" can be rephrased to "This is the thing N" or "This is the thing #N" easily, and if that form without ordinal is acceptable for many languages, we should say that it is also OK in C-locale without translation. So I agree that the recent change was pointless (even though the result may be localizable).

In an ideal world, I would imagine that this would be done by using Q_("This is the first thing", "This is the thing #%d", nth) aka ngettext, but

    (1) I haven't seen ngettext used from shell scripts; and

    (2) I do not think po files are set up to express "for this
        message, this language has 4 variants and here are the local
        rules to decide which one to use depending on the number,
        but the rules apply only to this message".  The Plural-Forms
        rule [*1*] seems to be global to a .po file, unfortunately.

so I do not think we cannot do it with ngettext().

[Reference]

*1* https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html