On 12/4/07, Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Em Seg, 2007-12-03 às 15:07 -0500, Thomas Thurman escreveu: > > I quite understand the morphology issue, but in this context it has to > > do with keywords (which necessarily are immune from morphology). I was > > not suggesting (and would not suggest) folding strings together which > > varied only by arbitrary nouns, as in the two examples you give. > > But the morphology of the surrounding sentence can be changed if the > keyword is male, female, singular, plural etc.
In the specific examples Thomas mentioned: #: ../src/theme-parser.c:1547 #, c-format msgid "No \"bottom\" attribute on element <%s>" msgstr "" the first noun is the word "attribute", so gender nor plural should matter -- the word "attribute" will always have the same gender and plural. Granted, in some languages the morphology will still matter, because of rules that make other words change depending on whether the %s starts with a wovel or not, for example. But in such cases, the problem can often be avoided by rewriting the sentence in the translation, and changing the sentence order: msgid "No \"bottom\" attribute on element <%s>" msgstr "The element <%2$s> lacks the following attribute: \"%1$s\"" The example is fictious, but should demonstrate the general idea. If a language has morphology issues like this, it is often solveable by rearranging the translation. In the case of explaining keywords, like in the fr and vi cases, my take on this is that it depends on the message. In my opinion, plain error messages do not need explanations, they're there to be short and concise and explain the condition that triggered the error, not to explain everything there is to know. Also, in the particular examples above, the error message is there to tell you the following pieces of the information: 1) An error occurred 2) The error was an missing attribute 3) What element lacked that attribute No more than that. In particular, the answer to the question "what does this attribute mean" is not part of the original message, and is out of scope. It is simply irrelevant to the error condition. If you need to know more about the particular attribute or element, look it up in the docs. On the other hand, schema descriptions, like the following fictious example, I treat differently: #: foo.schemas.in:42 msgid "Vertical alignment. Possible values are \"top\", \"middle\", and \"bottom\"." msgstr "Vertikal justering. Möjliga värden är \"top\" (överkant), \"middle\" (mitten) och \"bottom\" (nederkant)." The idea behind this distinction is that long schema descriptions are there to be descriptive and fully contained -- you should not need to further look up what the values mean. Also, the length of the message does not matter much. This is unlike most error messages and other short messages where keywords may appear. So, I still fully support and welcome the original suggestion to change the messages into msgid "No \"%s\" attribute on element <%s>" Christian _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
