Re: [Monotone-devel] very similar strings in L10n

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 02:56:53PM +0100, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> Translating monotone to Italian I'm noticing quite a few redundant or
> similar strings in monotone, e.g.:
> "directory to delete '%s' does not exist"
> "directory to delete, '%s', does not exist"

Feel free to consider these bugs, and just fix them.  It is not too
hard to just change one of the strings in the source code so that
they're the same :-).

> Also, strings are quoted in various ways: often '%s', also often %s
> without quotes, sometimes [%s].

Err, yeah, we should probably pick some style for this.  I don't
really know what's best.  Having _some_ sort of quoting is often nice,
just to make clear what's going on in case %s turns out to expand to
an empty string, or a string with trailing spaces, or suchlike.

> Also, some strings end with a newline or a space: I don't think they
> should be "inside" the localizable part, but rather should be appended
> "after"..? (but maybe not, it's a matter of personal taste, here)

Ending in spaces seems a bit odd, I'm not sure why that would
happen... ending in newlines is usually also a bug, and can be simply
fixed.  In particular, arguments to P/L/W/N/E will all have a newline
appended automatically, and should not contain a literal trailing
newline.

> In the Italian translation I'm trying to be more "uniform" in the
> style, e.g. translating in the same way the two "directory to delete"
> sentences, always quoting in the same way (‘%s’) and so on... but I
> think that tidying it up a bit could be a nice target for 1.0 0=)

Right.  I guess it isn't much harder to tidy up the English version
than the Italian (maybe less, since once you've tidied up the English,
you don't _have_ to tidy up the Italian :-)), but whatever works.

> (and after I defend my thesis I hope to have some more time to help)

Good luck!

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"But suppose I am not willing to claim that.  For in fact pianos
are heavy, and very few persons can carry a piano all by themselves."