GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 131875
"%s's desktop" genitive in gnome-panel difficult to translate
Last modified: 2005-08-15 01:39:11 UTC
#: gnome-panel/panel-menu-bar.c:175 #, c-format msgid "Quit from %s's desktop" This type of genitive with an unknown %s is often *very* difficult to translate, as each language has its own rules for how genitives are handled. As an example, the rule in Swedish is that genitives are accomplished by tacking an "s" (without an apostrophe) to the noun, although if the noun ends in an s-like sound like s or z, the genitive s should simply be omitted. Thus, the following examples would be correct: "Quit from christian's desktop" => "Avsluta från christians skrivbord" "Quit from daniel's desktop" => "Avsluta från daniels skrivbord" "Quit from marcus's desktop" => "Avsluta från marcus skrivbord" "Quit from anders's desktop" => "Avsluta från anders skrivbord" "Quit from mats's desktop" => "Avsluta från mats skrivbord" The following would NOT be correct: "Avsluta från marcuss skrivbord" "Avsluta från anderss skrivbord" "Avsluta från matss skrivbord" There seems to be no remotely trivial solution to analyze and accomplish this in code. And a rewriting like: "Quit from the desktop of %s" => "Avsluta från skrivbordet som tillhör %s" seems more than a bit weird and clumsy in Swedish, and possibly also so (even though to a lesser extent) in English. Thus, my primary suggestion would be for the user name to be simply skipped in the first place in this message. See also the similar bugs bug 45360, bug 96394, and bug 125964.
Simply translate it by "Avsluta från %.0s skrivbord". regs, Chris
I'm fairly sure this is not only a problem in Swedish. Hence the bug report.
*** Bug 134476 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
These are problematic in similar way. #: gnome-panel/menu.c:3232 gnome-panel/panel-menu-bar.c:206 #, c-format msgid "Log Out %s" #: gnome-panel/menu.c:3246 #, c-format msgid "" "Log out %s of this session to log in as a different user or to shut down " "your computer"
This is also gramatically correct in English. If the user's name ends in s, the log out message should not have an s. Current: "Quit from Jesus's desktop" Should be: "Quit from Jesus' desktop" It's the very problem that has been pointed out in Swedish by Christian above..
gramatically *incorrect* Bad typing monkey!
Why do we have such strings at all? Is it really a good idea to abuse the action menu to tell the user what his login name is? Same is valid for the filechooser and various other locations. Today, I've written a simple applet which can display the user's name or his home folder location. It has got a simple one-key GConf backend. IMHO that solution would be cleaner than scattering those "someone's Desktop" strings around. regs, Chris
Christian: this was added after a bug has been opened by the Sun guys about this. All: sorry that this hasn't be dealt with before the string freeze. I did not work a lot on GNOME lately... Ok, so tell me what should be changed: msgid "Quit from %s's desktop" => change to "Quit from desktop" msgid "Log Out %s" => is this one a problem? What do you propose? "Log Out"? msgid "" "Log out %s of this session to log in as a different user or to shut down " "your computer" => is this one a problem? What do you propose? Btw, shouldn't it be "Log %s out of..."? Once we all agree on those three strings and if you think we should change this before 2.6.0, I'll send a mail to gnome-i18n and r-t to ask permission to change the freeze with the new ones. Else, it'll be fixed as soon as we branch.
Last two are already present in translations as "Log Out" (menu.c:111) and "Log out of this session to log in as a different user or to shut down the computer" (menu.c:114). Basically, I have translated this so far to "Log Out '%s'", but this still sucks, because usernames usually remind of words, and they need to go through declinations. The first one might remind of the message "Log out of GNOME" (panel-action-button.c:266), so these three proposals would fix it without breaking string freeze, but it would probably affect documentation writers (btw, I think this probably sucks for documentation writers as well: is it really easier for them to say something like "Choose 'Actions' in Gnome menu, followed by 'Log Out USERNAME', where USERNAME is your username"?).
Danilo: thanks. Your solution is a good one and it's really better to reuse the same strings (it eases the translation and improves the consistency). I'll send a mail to the documentation people to get their approval and commit the changes if they agree. Thanks again for your help
Sorry to step on toes, but "Jesus's desktop" (it must be comforting to some to know that he uses GNOME) is perfectly correct. See Section 7.17 of the Fifteen Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style for more information.
"Jesus" isn't an uncommon name in hispanic countries.
I think the *literal* translation could be skipped into a form of locale reader translation. If the literal translated string didn't make much sense or has some divergences in your language, but you knew how it shall be in your language, feel free to write it in the best way, just keep the idea.
Fixed in CVS without breaking the string freeze. i18n people: could you join the discussion on bug #130663 so we can find a good way to do this for GNOME 2.8. Thanks