Re: Composing sentences makes them hard to translate

[Paul Eggert]

"Göran Uddeborg" <address@hidden> writes:

> In the macro _STRTOL_ERROR in lib/xstrtol.h contains strings like
>
>    "invalid %s `%s'"
>
> where the first %s is some kind of object, different for different
> calls.  This is problematic to translate, since the translation of
> "invalid" would have different forms dependent on what the object is.

True, but how would we fix it?  Here are the uses of that macro in
coreutils:

lib/human.c:477:    STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (spec, _("block size"), e);
src/od.c:1653:      STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (optarg, _("skip argument"), s_err);
src/od.c:1662:      STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (optarg, _("limit argument"), s_err);
src/od.c:1673:          STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (optarg, _("minimum string length"), 
s_err);
src/od.c:1745:          STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (optarg, _("width specification"), 
s_err);
src/pr.c:807:    _STRTOL_ERROR (EXIT_FAILURE, pages, _("page range"), err);
src/pr.c:817:   _STRTOL_ERROR (EXIT_FAILURE, pages, _("page range"), err);
src/sort.c:675:  STRTOL_FATAL_ERROR (s, _("sort size"), e);

If we changed the calls along the lines that you suggested, we'd
have to change the first call to be something like this:

    error (exit_failure,
           (e & LONGINT_INVALID_SUFFIX_CHAR
            ? _("invalid character following block size in `%s'")
            : e == LONGINT_OVERFLOW
            ? _("block size `%s' too large")
            : _("invalid block size `%s'")),
           spec);

and we'd have to do something similar for each of the other seven
calls.  This would be a pain to maintain: if we add another error code
we'll have to go rewrite all the callers.  Also, it bloats the code.

There is a tradeoff here between ease of maintenance and idiomatic
translations.

Hmm, I suppose I could be talked into changing things.  Jim, what do
you think?  An advantage of the change (aside from making translations
more idiomatic) is that it relies less on C macro magic.