Danilo Segan wrote: > The usual practice among english-speaking programmers is to "compose" > strings out of smaller parts.
You need to educate the programmer to use entire sentences. You can refer them to the gettext documentation, section "Preparing Translatable Strings". http://www.gnu.org/manual/gettext/html_chapter/gettext_3.html#SEC15 The reason is that in most languages sentences are not composed by juxtaposition, as in English: - For Serbian, you have given examples. - In many languages, a verb's form is spelled differently depending on the gender of the subject. - In Latin, the combiner "and" comes as a suffix "-que". - Etc. etc. > The translation for "Workspace %d" would look like: > msgid "Workspace %d" > msgstr<0> "der Workspace %d" > msgstr<1> "das Workspace %d" > msgstr<2> "dem Workspace %d" > msgstr<3> "den Workspace %d" > > So, the title of "Workspace 5" would be "der Workspace 5", while the > menu which allows switching to that workspace would read "Switch to den > Workspace 5". There are more bits of context that influence a translation than just a declination. For example, the beginning of a sentence is special. To pursue your example, an English programmer would be tempted to write "%<0>s is empty." which would have the German translation "%<0>s ist leer." and result in the final string "der Workspace %d is leer." which is wrong because, in German, all sentences must start with a capital letter. Bruno -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/