Re: Use of articles
Martin Eberhard Schauer wrote:
> recently i reviewed a translation on debian-l10n-german.
>>>> # German SquirrelMail Compatibility Plugin Translation File
>>>> ...
>>>> #, php-format
>>>> msgid "The file %s is missing from plugin %s."
>>>> msgstr "Die Datei %s fehlt der Erweiterung %s."
>>>>
>>> (translated) I'm afraid the article is missing in the Englisch text.
>>>
>>> msgid "The file %s is missing from the plugin %s."
>>> ^^^
>>>
>> (translated) IMHO no article is missing - it is often omitted in English texts.
>> I suggest asking a native speaker before filing a bug report.
> To me (i'm German) the example sounds very strange without an article.
> Until now i often considered missing articles as mistakes.
>
> I would be grateful for an explanation regarding the correct use (and
> omission) of articles.
A definite article there seems like an improvement, but it's
somewhere well short of "Severity: grave".
The alternatives are
msgid "The file %s is missing from the plugin %s."
msgid "The file %s is missing from plugin %s."
It's fairly common for articles to be elided in dialogue messages.
If that makes them mildly ungrammatical, that isn't necessarily
fatal - sometimes in this context it's conventional to prefer terse,
clear messages to grammatical ones. After all, "SYNTAX ERROR" isn't
a sentence!
It's also a bit unclear whether this is "ungrammatical" or just a
stylistic issue. Journalistic English produces sentences like:
I interviewed world hopscotch champion Maisie Smith...
where the normal conversational style would be to introduce a
definite article (and/or rearrange things entirely).
Mind you, what kind of expansion is that %s going to get? If it's a
name that readers are expected to recognise (or see as a
self-explanatory description) rather than a cryptic label then you
might be better off with:
msgid "The file %s is missing from the %s plugin."
(I'd say "the logger plugin" but "the plugin sm-xyzlog.php"; see
"http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/linux/esl.html#c2";.)
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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