Re: [PATCH 05/21] i18n: sequencer: mark entire sentences for translation

[Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>]

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 8:44 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:
>> For what it's worth I agree with you and disagree with Eric here and
>> Junio in the "[PATCH 03/21] i18n: advice: internationalize message for
>> conflicts" thread.
>>
>> Of course there's a trade-off in source code verbosity when you have
>> to change every occurance of (pseudocode):
>>
>>     "our %s failed" # %s can be revert or merge
>>
>> to:
>>
>>     if (action == "merge")
>>         gettext("our merge failed")
>>     elsif (action == "revert")
>>         gettext("our revert failed")
>>
>> But forcing the translator to turn every such occurrence that flows
>> naturally in English into "the '%s' command failed" leads to a worse
>> translation.
>>
>> For example, if I ever get around to doing the Icelandic translation
>> which I've had on my backlog I might translate something like this:
>> ...
>> I.e. even though you might be running "git merge" or "git revert" the
>> UI is talking about those terms in the translated using native terms
>> for the action of merging or reverting, but referring to the literal
>> command names in English.
>> ...
>> It just doesn't flow as well, and leads to a more verbose translation.
>
> OK.  I couldn't judge your example in Icelandic, but I have enough
> trust in you to believe your conclusion ;-).

I have no problem viewing the issue from either side (the sentence
referencing a *literal* command or the *action* of the command), and
understood that it could go either way when I wrote the review. What
threw me was that 3/21 seemed to be using the literal command in the
strings rather than the action, despite the commit message. For
instance:

    error(_("commit is not possible because ..."));
    error(_("merge is not possible because ..."));
    error(_("pull is not possible because ..."));
    error(_("revert is not possible because ..."));

In each case, the first word looks like a git command; it's not
particularly grammatically correct. Had Vasco instead changed them to:

    committing is not possible...
    merging is not possible...
    pulling is not possible...
    reverting is not posible...

then the issue likely would never have come up.