[Monotone-i18n] Fw: [Monotone-devel] A few message seem a bit... confusing

[Richard Levitte]

There was a little bit of discussion around these issues, but not much
(see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.monotone.devel/18334).

We've talked about releasing monotone v1.0 within Q1 2011, and quite
honestly, I think monotone is ready for this, with a couple of
exceptions, where messages is one of the issues.

Q1 ends in a little more than a month, so it's starting to be time to
make a few decisions around messages and make sure we stick to them.
Here are my suggestions:

1. Stick with URI.  We're using them in a wide enough manner to
   justify it, and besides, there are enough people who think URL
   means 'http://...' that URI is a good way to make them think again.
   Anyone against?

4. Let's look through messages (po/monotone.pot) and make sure that
   all messages make sense and have proper punctionation.

   Remains the question of capitalization.  There are a number of
   messages starting with a lower case letter, and since they will
   appear after a colon (:), it makes sense.  So I suggest we have a
   look through to make sure messages that do not follow a colon are
   properly capitalized, which those that will follow a colon start
   with a lower case character.  Maybe that's how it is already...

5. I suggest that all %s that hold file names, tag names, branch names
   and the like get quoted with '' (translators will of course
   translate those to something that fits their language).  The GNU
   way suggest that quoting should be done with `' to immitate the
   characters ‘ (U2018) and ’ (U2019) as closely as possible.  I
   personally feel unsure about that, particularly because it tends to
   lock ugly in the fonts I use, hence my suggestion.
   Anyone against?

Are there other things regarding messages that we need to take care
of?  Please speak up if you've noticed anything.

Cheers,
Richard

-- 
Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"Life is a tremendous celebration - and I'm invited!"
-- from a friend's blog, translated from Swedish

> --- Begin Message ---
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> Subject: 
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> [Monotone-devel] A few message seem a bit...  confusing
>
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> Date: 
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> Sun, 24 Oct 2010 20:41:18 +0200 (CEST)
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>
>
>
> Hey,
>
> I'm currently translating new strings to Swedish, and I'm noticing a
> few things that seem, at the very least, confusing...
>
> 1. URL/URI: in some messages, we say URL and in others, we say URI.
>    I'd suggest going for one of them, not both.
>
> 2. The message "could not query default database locations" is very
>    confusing, it doesn't say at all what's really wrong, it just looks
>    like there's a magic query done somewhere.  In reality, this is
>    something that's configured in a monotonerc somewhere, but I
>    wouldn't understand that from this message.  I suggest it gets
>    changed to "no default database location configured" (I'm
>    translating to something like that in Swedish, anything else just
>    doesn't make sense)
>
>    Ref: cmd_list.cc:625 database.cc:4956
>
> 3. A little here and there, we're refering a "globish" or "globish
>    pattern...  I found that hard to translate and have a look around,
>    and discovered that this word is incorrect, at least according to
>    wikipedia.  It should be called a "glob".
>
>    Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)
>         http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glob
>
>    (btw, that makes "globish pattern" a tautology)
>
>    ... it isn't really easier to translate, but ... ;-)
>
> 4. What's up with the lack of punctuation in messages???  I can
>    possibly understand when it's only sentence, but this is getting
>    ridiculous (not to mention difficult to read)!
>
>      dropping incoming cert which was signed by a key we don't have
>      you probably need to obtain this key from a more recent netsync peer
>      the name of the key involved is '%s', but note that there are multiple
>      keys with this name and we don't know which one it is
>
>    Ref: network/netsync_session.cc:1030
>
>    (I've translated that particular message with first capital letters
>    and a period at the end of the message...  really, it was just too
>    ridiculous)
>
>    Also, at this point it seems to be a bit random for single sentence
>    messages as well.  Most message lack periods at the end, but some
>    have them.
>
> 5. Some %s are not quoted, some are quoted with '', some are quoted
>    with `', some are quoted with <>...  Is there a reason or are we
>    just not consistent?
>
> -- 
> Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
>                                         http://richard.levitte.org/
>
> "Life is a tremendous celebration - and I'm invited!"
> -- from a friend's blog, translated from Swedish
>
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> --- End Message ---