Subject: improve translator comment
From: Benno Schulenberg <[email-masked]>
To: Coreutils <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 21:37:59 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi,

The translator comment regarding the prompt in remove.c is
unclear, and the suggested alternative way of translation is
hardly any better than the original string.  Looking back in
history, the very first version of this comment was better:
it suggested an alternative that would seem to avoid any
grammatical discrepancies in most languages.  So, attached
patch reinstates that primal alternative, and tries to improve
the surrounding wording to explain the difficulty better.

Benno

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From 9443f57b045ee203f9cb772b3a4893b7eaa20419 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Benno Schulenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 21:26:54 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] remove: improve translator comment by reinstating older version

* src/remove.c (prompt): Explain where the difficulty with translating
these two strings resides, and suggest an alternative: the one that
Paul Eggert first proposed back in 2002, which seems fully resistant.
---
 src/remove.c |    9 +++++----
 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/remove.c b/src/remove.c
index b98f3ec..4cc4a08 100644
--- a/src/remove.c
+++ b/src/remove.c
@@ -283,10 +283,11 @@ prompt (FTS const *fts, FTSENT const *ent, bool is_dir,
 
           fprintf (stderr,
                    (write_protected
-                    /* TRANSLATORS: You may find it more convenient to
-                       translate "%s: remove %s (write-protected) %s? "
-                       instead.  It should avoid grammatical problems
-                       with the output of file_type.  */
+                    /* TRANSLATORS: In the next two strings the second %s is
+                       replaced by the type of the file.  To avoid grammatical
+                       problems, it may be more convenient to translate these
+                       strings instead as: "%1$s: %3$s is write-protected and
+                       is of type '%2$s' -- remove it? ".  */
                     ? _("%s: remove write-protected %s %s? ")
                     : _("%s: remove %s %s? ")),
                    program_name, file_type (sbuf), quoted_name);
-- 
1.7.0.4