Eddy PetriÅor writes ("Please improve the wording of the translatable
messages"):
> Way too spartan messages to be understood (I looked at the code and
> couldn't understand how they should have been translated as, until I
> realised the format was "operation that was attempted: error string")
We've had this conversation before, last August. See the list
archives, the thread
Re: comments/string changes and issues with dpkg's messages
In general many of these messages should not be translated. I think
when dpkg was first i18n'd, someone ran a sed script over it to mark
all of the strings for translation.
See in particular, my message here:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2005/08/msg00053.html
If you're a translator and don't know what an English message means,
unfortunately only an expert can tell you whether that's because it's
a rarely-used technical message which should not be translated, or
simply badly worded.
I realise that this isn't particularly helpful, but the best approach,
as a rule of thumb, is for a translator to leave untranslated any
particular message they don't understand.
Another possibility would be for the translation team to provide a
list of the incomprehensible messages and then someone without
detailed knowledge of the workings could go through and un-mark them
by simply removing the _(...). If we did this there would be a few
badly-worded messages that would escape fixing, but that may be better
than continually bombarding the translators with messages they don't
understand.
Ian.
