On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 02:05:26AM +0100, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:
> Just noticed that base-config.pot became updated and I wish to clarify one
> point. It now says:
> The Debian package management tool, apt, is now configured, and can
> install any of ${PACKAGE_COUNT} packages.
> I.e. $PACKAGE_COUNT has not been there before. The consequence is that the
> translators have to rephrase this because of different grammatical forms
> of "packages" depending on the PACKAGE_COUNT. So in most cases something
> like "Seconds left: 10" has to be introduced into the translation, which
> doesn't make it more user-friendly, IMHO.
> My question is: how do I handle this? Is there any policy for the English
> "translators" not to include such lines? Can I get gettext to handle
> several cases, some kind of an if-Statement, which would also be supported
> by d-i interna?
GNU gettext has an interface, ngettext, designed to handle choosing
between multiple translations based on the number being substituted.
This is probably not practical for d-i.
In this case, I see two possibilities:
-- remove the package count, because it's more trouble for translators
than it's worth to the users
-- assume that ${PACKAGE_COUNT} falls into the largest plural category
the language has, because I don't know of a language where this
wouldn't be the case given the number of packages in Debian
It would be a major failure if apt ever thought it had less than 100
packages available for installation, let alone less than 10 (which is
when plurals get interesting for most languages).
--
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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