Commit 2dab6cd3c2e18eb574b24e54fba86a33c80b6a27 changed the progress messages for dd, but in doing so separated the instruction/hint for translators from the call to ngettext(). For xgettext to pick up such comments, the comment must end of the line directly before the call. So the current POT file for coreutils does not contain this comment/hint/instruction.
Second, the comment seems to consist of two parts that appear to be unrelated. So it would be better to split the text into two separate paragraphs. Third, the second part of that comment reads like this: If one of these formats A looks shorter on the screen than another format B, then A's string length should be less than B's, and appending strlen (B) - strlen (A) spaces to A should make it appear to be at least as long as B. I don't understand what it is trying to say. Does it say that if, of those four strings, untranslated string A is shorter than untranslated string B, that then also the translation of string A must be shorter than the translation of string B? If yes, then: 1) please reword, 2) why?, and 3) does the program blow up if not? Or is this part of the comment not meant for translators at all? Fourth, the first part of the comment begins with this: The instances of "s" in the following formats are the SI symbol "s" (meaning second), and should not be translated. Why should they not be translated? In order to avoid problems with grammatical congruence in languages like Polish? But for a language like Dutch I would accept the mild incongruence when the elapsed time is exactly x.1 seconds, which will be a rare occasion. For all other numbers it will be much clearer to say "seconden" instead of just "s". So I would suggest to change this part of the comment to: The instances of "s" in the next four strings are the SI symbol "s" (meaning seconds). It may be preferrable to leave them untranslated, to avoid problems with grammatical congruence. Fifth (and this is the reason I arrived here), when using status=progress, the elapsed time that is printed is shown with four or five decimals. 1) Is the time measurement really this accurate? 2) Sometimes the last one or two or three decimals happen to be zero, and then they get truncated, making the progress message a bit shorter for one second. It would be nicer to use a fixed number of decimals so that the message doesn't unnecessarily "jump". Sixth, the format string uses %g, which means that the number of seconds will be displayed in exponential form when the number becomes very large. Is that intentional? Wouldn't it be better to use %f? I've played a bit with it, and I think %.1f is best, because also the other numbers in the progress message, when they are in decimal form, use a single decimal of precision. Benno -- http://www.fastmail.com - Email service worth paying for. Try it for free