GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 344471
Surgery with translateable strings in LSR
Last modified: 2006-06-19 19:30:36 UTC
The following type of translateable messages are causing problems in LSR: #: ../src/LSRMain.py:179 #, python-format msgid "A %s with name %s was removed from profile %s" The second and third specifier should not be a problem here, I think. I assume that they are filled with the name and then the name of the profile, respectively. If you want to help translators with their assumptions, please use translator comments; they would be good to have in either case. Anyway, the problem is the first specifier in this sentence: "A %s with..." It seems like a noun will get inserted there. Please do not insert nouns into sentences with specifiers. I doubt this will even work with English; if the noun was "apple", "A apple with..." would be wrong. The problem gets much worse with other languages that may use different genders for different nouns, and then prefixes or even whole sentences may have to be rewritten depending on the gender of the noun. Please use full sentences instead: "A parameter with name %s was removed from profile %s" "An attribute with name %s was removed from profile %s" "A tag with name %s was removed from profile %s" etc.
Thanks for opening this bug. What exactly are translator comments and how do I use them? I'd love to give more hints on what the specifiers are. The trick here is that the first specifier in the sentence "A %s with name ..." is determined dynamically at run time from a potentially infinite set of nouns. It's probably not practical to provide separate strings for each noun. Since that message is only used as an error message anyways, what about leaving out the article: "%s with name %s was removed from profile %s" It's quite alright if the error message is terse and not a complete sentence in this case.
Removed all offending English articles. Added some comments for translators. Removed unncessary translations of exception messages for developers. Cleaned up translatable exception message for users. Thanks for the bug report. Please let me know if there are further problems. We will add more translator comments as we approach our 0.3.0 release.