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From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Formatted IO - Fortran style or similar.
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2012 17:28:16 +0100
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Date: 2012-08-01T17:28:16+01:00
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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