File: gettext.info,  Node: Entire sentences,  Next: Split at paragraphs,  Prev: Decent English style,  Up: Preparing Strings

4.3.2 Entire sentences
----------------------

   Translatable strings should be entire sentences.  It is often not
possible to translate single verbs or adjectives in a substitutable way.

     printf ("File %s is %s protected", filename, rw ? "write" : "read");

Most translators will not look at the source and will thus only see the
string ‘"File %s is %s protected"’, which is unintelligible.  Change
this to

     printf (rw ? "File %s is write protected" : "File %s is read protected",
             filename);

This way the translator will not only understand the message, she will
also be able to find the appropriate grammatical construction.  A French
translator for example translates "write protected" like "protected
against writing".

   Entire sentences are also important because in many languages, the
declination of some word in a sentence depends on the gender or the
number (singular/plural) of another part of the sentence.  There are
usually more interdependencies between words than in English.  The
consequence is that asking a translator to translate two half-sentences
and then combining these two half-sentences through dumb string
concatenation will not work, for many languages, even though it would
work for English.  That's why translators need to handle entire
sentences.

   Often sentences don't fit into a single line.  If a sentence is
output using two subsequent ‘printf’ statements, like this

     printf ("Locale charset \"%s\" is different from\n", lcharset);
     printf ("input file charset \"%s\".\n", fcharset);

the translator would have to translate two half sentences, but nothing
in the POT file would tell her that the two half sentences belong
together.  It is necessary to merge the two ‘printf’ statements so that
the translator can handle the entire sentence at once and decide at
which place to insert a line break in the translation (if at all):

     printf ("Locale charset \"%s\" is different from\n\
     input file charset \"%s\".\n", lcharset, fcharset);

   You may now ask: how about two or more adjacent sentences?  Like in
this case:

     puts ("Apollo 13 scenario: Stack overflow handling failed.");
     puts ("On the next stack overflow we will crash!!!");

Should these two statements merged into a single one?  I would recommend
to merge them if the two sentences are related to each other, because
then it makes it easier for the translator to understand and translate
both.  On the other hand, if one of the two messages is a stereotypic
one, occurring in other places as well, you will do a favour to the
translator by not merging the two.  (Identical messages occurring in
several places are combined by ‘xgettext’, so the translator has to
handle them once only.)