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Re: Emacs i18n


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: Emacs i18n
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2019 11:47:23 -0800
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.5.1

On 3/6/19 10:15 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> how do we deal with strings that are computed by concatenation or
> formatting?
>
The same way that other GNU packages deal with them: we redo calls, to
make the strings easier to translate. For example, instead of this code
(adapted from todo-mode.el):

  (message (concat "The highlighted item" (if (= count 1) " is " "s
precedes ")
                   "the timestamp %s.")
           timestamp)

we do something like this:

  (nmessage count
            "The highlighted item is not up to date."
            "The highlighted items are not up to date."
            timestamp)

where (nmessage N FMT1 FMT2 ...) is a new function that mimics GNU
ngettext by returning a translation of FMT1 (using N) if a translation
is available, and if no translation is available it falls back on using
FMT1 if N is 1 and FMT2 otherwise.

It's inevitable that we'd need to redo Lisp code this way, as
translators cannot be expected to be programming experts that understand
arbitrary Lisp code involving 'concat' and whatnot. This is what other
GNU packages have done, and Emacs can do something similar.

Of course it will be a big task to fully internationalize in this way,
and it's not something that can be done all at once. But it doesn't have
to be done all at once: we can create the machinery, do some proper i18n
of a few key Lisp modules, and let the other modules be fixed up later
when people find time.




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