From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Subject: Re: Formatted IO - Fortran style or similar.
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 17:28:16 +0100
Date: 2012-08-01T17:28:16+01:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m2mx2elgpr.fsf@nidhoggr.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 87boivrq3a.fsf@adaheads.sparre-andersen.dk
Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk> writes:
> stefan-lucks@see-the.signature writes:
>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2012, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
>
>>> How would you handle translatable user visible strings - such as
>>> "Parsing '${file_name}' failed on line ${line_number}." (where
>>> "${...}" identifies parameter substitutions) - in Ada?
>>
>> Why do you need to *substitute* the parameters in the string at all?
>>
>> Without substitution, the following seems to work fine:
>>
>> Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line("Parsing " & File_Name &
>> " failed on line " & To_String(Line_Number) &
>> ".");
>
> Yes. But how do you translate that text without having to recompile
> the whole application?
>
> My question was related to _translatable_ user visible strings. If I
> just want to make an all-American program, your proposed solution is
> fine, but when I want to make it easy to translate the user visible
> strings in an application you proposed solution is unacceptable.
Exactly so. From the GNU gettext manual[1],
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.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Preparing-Strings
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-08-01 16:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-07-30 8:50 Formatted IO - Fortran style or similar Mark Murray
2012-07-30 9:59 ` Ian Clifton
2012-07-30 18:57 ` Michael Rohan
2012-07-30 22:12 ` Mark Murray
2012-07-31 7:17 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
[not found] ` <npbe18d3o3gdc2ut41f1codvv6rhfgidr3@invalid.netcom.com>
2012-07-31 11:56 ` Jacob Sparre Andersen
2012-07-31 15:12 ` stefan-lucks
2012-07-31 17:34 ` Adam Beneschan
2012-08-01 6:56 ` stefan-lucks
[not found] ` <be5g18p0gnf2ocdf3hmgjslgnu0jogrh91@invalid.netcom.com>
2012-08-01 6:48 ` stefan-lucks
2012-08-01 8:09 ` Jacob Sparre Andersen
2012-08-01 10:28 ` Georg Bauhaus
2012-08-01 16:28 ` Simon Wright [this message]
2012-08-01 19:14 ` Michael Rohan
replies disabled
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox