[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

Albert Astals Cid aacid at kde.org
Sun Aug 2 08:54:34 PDT 2009


A Diumenge, 2 d'agost de 2009, Luca Ferretti va escriure:
> > > The solutions you propose add clutter to the menus, in the form of
> > >
> > > > parens or dashes, just to cover up the fact that there is no good way
> > > > to combine the two fields that does not cause translation problems.
> > >
> > > If you don't like parens or dashes, use the more modern two-line
> > > solution, with the name on the first line and the genericname on the
> > > second line.
> >
> > Ok, maybe I should have mentioned newlines as yet another workaround.
> >
> > Why is it so hard to acknowledge that if you want to show a piece of
> > text as one unit in the interface, it needs to be presented as one unit
> > to the translators ?
>
> As translator, proofreader and coordinator of translation team, I don't
> agree so much.
>
> First, most translators don't know what they have to do with those "Name
> GenericName" strings. We are forced to explain to new members what those
> translatable messages are and how should be translated.
>
> Second, some languages, such as French or Italian, don't follow the same
> layout. "Name GenericName" could sound like a grammar error in Italian,
> so we have to switch the order to "GenericName Name"[1]. This is a task
> that we have to manually perform and check, and we can't ensure that all
> translations will follow this rule, at least not for applications
> outside git.gnome.org (yes, some "amateur" translators strictly follow
> English rules in Italian...)
>
> So, as GNOME translator and coordinator, I could really appreciate a
> single "%1$s %2$s" translatable message in glib or gnome-menus to choose
> the default order and layout for Name and GenericName, once and for all.
> The (localized) FullName label could be programmatically composed,
> trusting that all labels will appear the same.
>
> But I agree that i18n/l10n is a crazy stuff, so a hardcoded FullName
> translatable string could be needed. For example, if you have
>
>   Name=Epiphany
>   GenericName=Web Browser
>   Name[it]=Epiphany
>   GenericName[it]=Web browser
>
> and you programmatically compose them using Name + GenericName, you'll
> have
>
>   [it] -> Epiphany Web browser
>
> This is an error in Italian language, it should be "Epiphany web
> browser" (see the case of Web/web). This is just a fictional example,
> just to show that the programmaticall approach couldn't be good for some
> languages (I repeat, some language, and it's just a personal
> hypothesis).

That's an error on how you use Name and GenericName, nowhere in the 
speficication says you can team them up to get a meaningful string.

But adding FullName to solve that is not a good idea either, Name is already 
FullName.

Fix your software instead of breaking the specification.

Albert


More information about the xdg mailing list