GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 119254
"Starting %s" composed message difficult to translate correctly
Last modified: 2012-06-20 15:43:46 UTC
When I start an application, for example Mozilla, I get a message in the task list telling the application is starting. The message is reportedly this one in gnome-desktop (libgnome-desktop): #: libgnome-desktop/gnome-desktop-item.c:1728 #, c-format msgid "Starting %s" There is a serious problem with this from a localization point of view. Puzzling strings together like this rarely ever works in other languages, due to differences in grammar, word order, and capitalization rules. For example, it really should be: "Startar textredigerare" in Swedish since Swedish never uses uppercase letters in the middle of sentences unless it's a name. But "Text Editor" needs to be translated into "Textredigerare" with a capital T since it's also used standalone. The Swedish example is just a very simple example, there most likely are more complex ones involving genders and articles in other languages. To keep things short, a statement of fact is that sentences can only ever be properly translated in full (more of this is explained on http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#split-sentences). Hence, the only proper solution to this problem is to allow every application to provide its own startup message (similar to how every nautilus view provides its own "View as" message, for exactly the same reasons).
maybe we should just drop the word "starting" and show the app description only?
The original method probably worked pretty well in many languages when names alone were used. I'll try to show what I mean in English. "Starting Mozilla" is ok. "Starting The web browser Mozilla" is not correct English, while a menu entry "The web browser Mozilla" is. If one considers the menu entries as a kind of title, one could possibly argue that "The Web Browser Mozilla" also is correct, but "Starting The Web Browser Mozilla" could hardly be seen as a title, and is thus incorrect. Even if it was a title, I believe "t" in "the" should not be capital. All according to the English rules I once learned. English is not my language, so I might miss some details. I hope the essence comes through anyway.
Adding myself to the CC list. Havoc IMO has the right idea here - there's no need for the Starting, since more often than not it just pushes the application name out of the too-small box in the window list. A twiddler like the one used by Mozilla to show whether a page is loading or not might be used as an alternative idea to replace the icon while the window is not shown. (Please no foot though.)
I think this makes sense.
That string doesn't exist anymore (or it moved somewhere else, like in glib/GIO).