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List:       coreutils-bug
Subject:    Composing sentences makes them hard to translate
From:       "=?iso-8859-1?q?G=F6ran_Uddeborg?=" <goeran () uddeborg ! se>
Date:       2006-10-31 17:34:42
Message-ID: 17735.35122.209698.508731 () mimmi ! uddeborg ! se
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In the macro _STRTOL_ERROR in lib/xstrtol.h contains strings like

   "invalid %s `%s'"

where the first %s is some kind of object, different for different
calls.  This is problematic to translate, since the translation of
"invalid" would have different forms dependent on what the object is.
In general, composing a sentence programmatically doesn't play well
with translation.  Different languages would have to compose
differently.  The gettext package has support for this for plural
forms, but apart from that the practical solution is to expand to one
string for each case.



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