Subject: Re: bug#18776: i18n/l10n error

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 15:30:38 +0200

Salut Mathieu,

Mathieu Lirzin <[email-masked]> skribis:

> while translating Guix po file to french,

Note that all translation efforts are handled by the Translation
Project, so make sure to work in that framework to avoid duplicated
work:

  http://translationproject.org/html/translators.html

> i noticed a strange thing. The translation doesn't fit. don't know
> whether it's just a translation problem or a gettextize issue.
>
> #+NAME: po/guix/de.po
> #+BEGIN_SRC 
> #: guix/scripts/package.scm:520
> #, fuzzy
> msgid ""
> "\n"
> "  --show=PACKAGE         show details about PACKAGE"
> msgstr ""
> "\n"
> "  -i, --install=PAKET    PAKET installieren"

There’s nothing wrong here: it’s just the normal syntax for multi-line
strings (info "(gettext) PO Files"):

  When the time comes to write multi-line strings, one should not use
  escaped newlines.  Instead, a closing quote should follow the last
  character on the line to be continued, and an opening quote should
  resume the string at the beginning of the following PO file line.  For
  example:

       msgid ""
       "Here is an example of how one might continue a very long string\n"
       "for the common case the string represents multi-line output.\n"

  In this example, the empty string is used on the first line, to allow
  better alignment of the ‘H’ from the word ‘Here’ over the ‘f’ from the
  word ‘for’.  In this example, the ‘msgid’ keyword is followed by three
  strings, which are meant to be concatenated.  Concatenating the empty
  string does not change the resulting overall string, but it is a way for
  us to comply with the necessity of ‘msgid’ to be followed by a string on
  the same line, while keeping the multi-line presentation left-justified,
  as we find this to be a cleaner disposition.  The empty string could
  have been omitted, but only if the string starting with ‘Here’ was
  promoted on the first line, right after ‘msgid’.(1)  It was not really
  necessary either to switch between the two last quoted strings
  immediately after the newline ‘\n’, the switch could have occurred after
  _any_ other character, we just did it this way because it is neater.

So I’m closing this bug.  Let me know if there’s something I overlooked.

Thanks,
Ludo’.