> I agree with you on that, but I would like to remind you > that the message-ids technically are POSIX/C and not > English.
That is a wrong assumption; the template could be in Spanish, Romanian, or Dutch, it does not matter OTOH, POSIX/C is _not_ a language, but a standard. And we are talking here about messages that happend to be templates and _should_ be in "good clear English, as Scott said. > > I do not believe that this should be sacrificed for the > > sake of making it easier for non-English speakers -- > > that's what the entire i18n effort is for, providing those > > people with their own native language version. > > No. But if translators don't understand the message-ids, it I do think that some of the messages will be hard to understand, even by a native English speaker. I dare you, Scott, to take 5 of your non-techie friends and ask them to tell you what they understand from any random (obscure) 10 strings (as I saw that frequently encountered ones are more polished) from dpkg and see if they understand them. I bet that you will be surprised. Anyway, no need to argue here; I will try to modify the dpkg source and add automatic comments, so the quality of the messages in dpkg improves. > > So in effect, I agree that "X is not a clear English > > message" is a valid bug; and I agree that "this string is > > incomplete, and not translatable" is a valid bug (cf. > > "unable to %s"); but I do not agree that "I can't > > translate this because I don't understand the English" is > > a bug -- that's what dictionaries are for. I agree with all of your statements above; (I wonder if you can find any message that fit the last type in the ones I sent) > > Correct, it's a syscall. This error is reporting the > > failure of a syscall, so has to use the name of the > > syscall that failed, obviously. > > In the version whoever will try to fix the error gets, yes. > In the version the user gets, no. System calls don't mean I guess Jacob's answer is quite relevant in the point we (translators) want to make. -- Regards, EddyP ============================================= "Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein
