GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 163652
Use a translator comment explaining how to avoid genitive in gnome-user-share schemas message
Last modified: 2005-02-04 08:58:44 UTC
#: user_share.c:148 #, c-format msgid "%s's public files" Genitives written this way are difficult to translate into other languages. First of all, many languages don't have the Saxon genitive, but use other forms ("the public files of %s"), so it may be difficult to get this right for translators. See topic 13 at http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/locale-5.html. Second, even for languages that use the Saxon genitive, this design may cause problems, as the form of the genitive may depend on the word inserted at the %s. For example, you would have this in Swedish: Owner Correct genitive *Incorrect* genitive ------------------------------------------------------------ Tom Toms publika filer Christian Christians publika filer Andreas Andreas publika filer Andreass publika filer Markus Markus publika filer Markuss publika filer Niklas Niklas publika filer Niklass publika filer Alex Alex publika filer Alexs publika filer As you can see, the standard form for a Swedish genitive is to simply add an "s" at the end (no apostrophes). However, if the name of the owner already ends in an s-like sound, no s should be added. Naturally, this is difficult to accomplish with an "%ss publika filer" design, as you would get the incorrect forms listed above, unless you add some special logic to determine if the name ends in an s-like sound. Even then, this would probably only work for some languages, and not others. The best way to avoid all this is to avoid Saxon genitives, and instead use "the ... of %s" style. However, if this is undesired, please at least add a translator comment, explaining how to avoid the genitive alltogether. This example comment is based on the one suggested in bug 45360: /* Translators: The %s will get filled in with the user name of the user, to form a genitive. If this is difficult to translate correctly so that it will work correctly in your language, you may use something equivalent to "Public files of %s", or leave out the %s altogether. In the latter case, please put "%.0s" somewhere in the string, which will match the user name string passed by the C code, but not put the user name in the final string. This is to avoid the warning that msgfmt might otherwise generate. */
fixed, thanks.