Re: [Bug-gnulib] 4-gary-version-etc-full-author-string.patch

[Bruno Haible]

Gary V.Vaughan wrote:
> Isn't there a list to co-ordinate i18n of gnu programs?

We have two lists, bug-gnu-gettext at gnu org (archived under bug-gnu-utils)
and translation-i18n at lists sourceforge net.

> I'm pretty sure I saw an rms announcement go by a year or two ago.

I'm not aware of such an announcement.

> pasting into "Written by %s.\n" (translated) may be different 
> to the translation of "Written by Rene' Seindal and Gary V. Vaughan.\n".

I tend to agree. Although I don't know the precise language where this
would make a difference, I suspect for some Slavic language (Slovak, Ukrainian
or so) it will. The GNU gettext documentation recommends it for this reason:

   Entire sentences are also important because in many languages, the
   declination of some word in a sentence depends on the gender or the
   number (singular/plural) of another part of the sentence.  There are
   usually more interdependencies between words than in English.  The
   consequence is that asking a translator to translate two half-sentences
   and then combining these two half-sentences through dumb string
   concatenation will not work, for many languages, even though it would
   work for English.  That's why translators need to handle entire
   sentences.

Bruno