Re: Questions regarding some translatable strings in Galeon

On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 20:58 +0000, Misu Moldovan wrote:

[Warning detailed i18n issues follow]

> #. translators: the first %s is the language name, and the
> #. * second %s is the locale name. Example:
> #. * "French (France)
> #. * Also: The text before the "|" is context to help you decide on
> #. * the correct translation. You MUST OMIT it in the translated  
> string.
> #.
> #: utils/gul-iso-codes.c:339 utils/gul-iso-codes.c:345
> #, fuzzy, c-format
> msgid "language|%s (%s)"
> 
> Well obviuosly the developer tried to give some hints but I fail to  
> fully understand. Because:
> 	a) the "%s (%s)" part must be present in the msgstr string
> 	b) it says I must omit the text before the "|"
> 	c) the example given contradicts the first two assertions.
> 
> My vote goes to either (following the example):
> msgstr "România (Română)"
> 
> or (following the logic of translations):
> msgstr "|%s (%s)"

This sort of construct is a new, there was a short discussion of it on
the gnome-i18n list on December:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2004-December/thread.html

Basically the format of the string is (ignoring the above example):

<context>|actual text

This means that, for example, translators can translate "Russian" (the
noun") and "Russian" (the verb) differently. To do that, you would see

msgid "noun|Russian"

and 

msgid "verb|Russian"

To translate those, you remove the "noun|" bit and the "verb|" bit and
just translate whats left, taking into account the context.

Back to the example here, basically I was just trying to get across how
the particular string is used, e.g. we put a language in the first %s
and a country in the second %s, you just ignore the "language|" bit,
it's just to give context in case there is somewhere else in the code
that uses the "%s (%s)" format in a different manner (that may need
translating differently).

In summary, you can probably just translate it as (assuming you don't
have any re-ordering issues):

msgstr "%s (%s)" 


> I've translated thousands of strings in the last five years, but  
> haven't encounter yet such a brain twister construction...

It is new, and epiphany makes heavy use of it, but it does seem to be
causing translators problems, so I might just get rid of this one
instance of it.


> 2) "I know you have to ask, but please don't..."
> 
> msgid ""
> "Do not ask about lifetime for session cookies when lifetime policy is  
> to ask"

With the cookie prefs, you can set it to "ask before accepting a
cookie", this particular string just describes the preference to stop
galeon from asking about session cookies.

> Can please someone explain what is this all about? Is it sinonymous  
> with the mundane "Don't ever ask about session cookies lifetime"?

Basically, yes, and that is a much better phrase to use, I'll change it
to that at somepoint.

HTH

Crispin



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