GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 152480
The strings "Add to %s" and "Select an _item to add to %s:" in gnome-panel are hard to translate
Last modified: 2005-01-10 07:47:17 UTC
These strings are difficult to translate to swedish. In swedish, the messages will be translated to "Lägg till i Top Panel" / "Lägg till i Bottom Panel" and "Välj ett objekt att lägga till i Top Panel" / "Välj ett objekt att lägga till i Bottom Panel" which aren't correct. The problematic strings are: #: gnome-panel/panel-addto.c:766 #, c-format msgid "Add to %s" #: gnome-panel/panel-addto.c:774 #, c-format msgid "Select an _item to add to %s:"
(cc'ing Christian) How can we make this better? Should we get rid of the panel names there? We need to tell the user on which panel the applet will be added...
There are two problems here: 1) The "Bottom Panel" etc. parts aren't translated. Something is likely broken wrt these strings being properly marked for translation. 2) Composed messages like this, were words in a sentence are marked seperately for translation, are very hard to translate easily/cleanly, or not even possible to translate correctly at all. As an example of the 2), Swedish has no concept of header capitalization. This means that sentence capitalization has to be used everywhere, and that writing something like the equivalent of "Add to Bottom Panel" or "Add to Bottom panel" would be wrong and look horrendous in Swedish. It should be written as the equivalent of "Add to bottom panel" in Swedish, using only sentence caps. The problem is, if the "Bottom Panel" string is used elsewhere in a standalone fashion, it should be translated and shown as the equivalent of "Bottom panel" in Swedish, with a capital start letter. As you can see, then there's no way to translate this situation correctly. And this is just one example where sentence surgery like this ruins translations. Please always mark seperate, complete sentences for translation: _("Add to Top Panel") _("Add to Bottom Panel") _("Select an _item to add to Top Panel:") _("Select an _item to add to Bottom Panel:") Please note that altering these strings now would unfortunately break string freeze, and need seperate string freeze approval.
"Top Panel" and "Bottom Panel" seem to be the default names of the panel for first-time users. These names are not generated, but are in gnome-panel/panel-default-setup.entries. I suppose the panels created by the user don't have names, and so the shown message is _("Add to the panel") I think the main problem here is that the name of the panel is not automatically generated but can be chosen by the user, so we can't mark the complete sentences for translation. I think there was some discussion about getting rid of the names somewhere. I can't remember if a decision was taken
Sorry for the spam. Confirming some bugs. Filter on "VINCENT CONFIRMS" to ignore.
Small update: the "Top Panel" and "Bottom Panel" came from gnome-panel/panel-default-setup.entries. I've removed them a few days ago. So, now the message will be "Add to the panel" except if the user specified a name for the panel in gconf or if the panel is a drawer: message will be "Add to %s" where %s was provided by the user or is _("Drawer").
If you could special-case the drawer case as well, so that you could provide a full sentence for translation, that would probably be the best, since that can as I understand it be expected to be a somewhat common case. E.g. "Add to Drawer". Otherwise, this message will look horrible in a language like Swedish as per comment 2.
Done in HEAD: there's a full sentence for the drawer. Note that when there is a name specified in gconf, the string is now "Select an _item to add to \"%s\"". It hould be clearer for the translators.