Re: [Boost-users] [boost.locale] linguistic case discrimination in translation

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [boost.locale] linguistic case discrimination in translation
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-08-19 23:45:41

On 17/08/2018 18:21, Olaf Peter wrote:
> I like to join two translation into a single one using the word 'and'
> if the code path require it, e.g. translation 1 is: "{1} error" and
> translation 2 is: "{1} warning" >
> if the relevant err/warn counter are both != 0 I want to combine this
> statement using the mentioned 'and'. I guess, an example teels more
> than this here: >
> see https://wandbox.org/permlink/HbnCLQKhHAb3eqZr or even on bottom.
> 
> Line 89 ... 94 looks too complicated to me even for the translator
> which need an own context of the intend.
One of the cardinal rules of translation is to not translate fragments, 
since different languages can have different sentence structures and 
word orderings.

So you should probably print exactly one of:

   - format(translate("{1} generated.")) % error_message
   - format(translate("{1} generated.")) % warning_message
   - format(translate("{1} and {2} generated.")) % error_message %
warning_message

If you're not using your error_message generation elsewhere you should
have the entire thing inlined in here rather than trying to factor it
out. Factoring out "common" sentence fragments rarely ends well.

Even the cases above where it appears that the format string for 
warnings and errors is the same, ideally should not use a common 
constant (although it is unavoidable in this case, unless you do inline 
it all so that they become unique), since it's plausible that some 
language might require the word 'generated' to have different emphasis 
depending on whether it is referring to warnings or errors.

Note how the example of the plural-form translate in 
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_67_0/libs/locale/doc/html/messages_formatting.html 
translates the entire string, even though it apparently has many words 
in common in English.