Re: an i18n sample

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:20:52 -0400
> From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>
> Cc: ibr@ata.cs.hun.edu.tr, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com
> 
> Sorry, my wording was not clear; I understood your suggestion.  I still
> disagree with it.  I think that a type whose name is "<unnamed>" or
> _("<unnamed>") should recieve the same output as a type whose TYPE_NAME
> is NULL.

I don't understand what you mean by "should receive the same output".
Can you explain?

> A format string is a different sort of problem than a partial sentence.
> It's a complete grammatical construct, but we have to take what steps
> we can to make sure that the parts that get substituted in make sense
> in any language.

Given a string "<unnamed>", how would a translator know that it is
supposed to be a substitution for %s in the format string?  The only
way to know that is to read the source, which a translator normally
does not do.  Without knowing the context of "<unnamed>", the
translator is unlikely to find a good translation for it.

> Can you give an example where the two above sentences should have
> different structure?  I can't think of one.

We should use good practices, because it is impossible to ask us to
know enough languages to decide whether every specific case can or
cannot go wrong.  The principle is "avoid partial sentences as much as
you can", for the reasons I tried to explain.