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Untranslatable string in help.def


From: Roland Illig
Subject: Untranslatable string in help.def
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2019 18:50:57 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.9.0

Hi,

in help.def, the code reads:

  if (glob_pattern_p (list->word->word))
    {
      printf ("%s", ngettext ("Shell commands matching keyword `",
"Shell commands matching keywords `", (list->next ? 2 : 1)));
      print_word_list (list, ", ");
      printf ("'\n\n");
    }

The strings for translations should always be a complete sentence since
in some languages the word order can differ. For example, in German, the
message would rather be:

Shellbefehle, die zum Schlüsselwort %s passen.
Shellbefehle, die zu den Schlüsselwörtern %s passen.

The "'\n\n" is not translated at all, which means the German translator
has to choose an unnatural grammar style to cope with this bug. Also,
the German translation for GNU software usually uses »these« quotes. The
current code prevents this also, since the closing quote is hard-coded
as "'". This is also bad for the Japanese version, and probably some more.

Best,
Roland (from the German translation team)



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