Re: po: Remove extraneous full stops from the Japanese translation.

[Akihiro Sagawa]

Hi Francois,

On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:28:02 +0100 (CET), Francois Gouget wrote:
> This is essentially the kernel32 error messages.
>
> po/ja.po | 1587 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------------------
>  1 files changed, 792 insertions(+), 795 deletions(-)

IMHO, the error message should be well-formed sentences. I confused a
lot while translating because some messages are not sentence style. For
such a reason, I translated the message into Japanese sentence. So
full-stops are reasonable.

Additionally, in Windows, a sentence with periods or full-stops is used for
the error message. So a Japanese Wine user might feel something wrong
with the message if I translate without full-stops.

Best regards,
Akihiro Sagawa

po: Remove extraneous full stops from the Japanese translation.

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012, Akihiro Sagawa wrote:
> Hi Francois,
>
> On Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:28:02 +0100 (CET), Francois Gouget wrote:
> > This is essentially the kernel32 error messages.
> >
> > po/ja.po | 1587 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------------------------
> >  1 files changed, 792 insertions(+), 795 deletions(-)
>
> IMHO, the error message should be well-formed sentences. I confused a
> lot while translating because some messages are not sentence style. For
> such a reason, I translated the message into Japanese sentence. So
> full-stops are reasonable.

English, French and a lot of other languages also put full stops at the 
end of well-formed sentences. However there are places where a full stop 
is not wanted: in tooltips, group labels and possibly when they are 
included in another string for instance. So I think that Japanese is no 
different from these other languages in this respect and thus should 
match the English strings wrt full stops.

That said it's possible the English error messages are wrong which seems 
to be what you're getting at below:
> Additionally, in Windows, a sentence with periods or full-stops is used for
> the error message. So a Japanese Wine user might feel something wrong
> with the message if I translate without full-stops.

How did you test that? Did you hack a conformance test to dump the 
output of FormatMessage (or som equivalent) for a bunch of error codes?
I'd like to check what Windows prints for the English messages.

po: Remove extraneous full stops from the Japanese translation.

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012, Akihiro Sagawa wrote:
[...]
> IMHO, the error message should be well-formed sentences. I confused a
> lot while translating because some messages are not sentence style. For
> such a reason, I translated the message into Japanese sentence. So
> full-stops are reasonable.

You were right on both points:
 1) All these error messages have a trailing full stop in English, 
    French and Japanese.
 2) They also tend to be much more verbose than Wine's messages and 
    usually form a proper sentence.

I'm not going to fix point 2.

But I think point 1 can and should be fixed. The question is how to do 
it without spending a month in the process or fuzzying all the existing 
translations. It probably needs to be scripted somehow and then the 
patch for both winerror.mc and the po files submitted? (or just submit 
the patch for winerror.mc and the script?)

po: Remove extraneous full stops from the Japanese translation.

[Alexandre Julliard]

Francois Gouget  writes:
> You were right on both points:
> - All these error messages have a trailing full stop in English, 
> French and Japanese.
> - They also tend to be much more verbose than Wine's messages and 
> usually form a proper sentence.
>
> I'm not going to fix point 2.
>
> But I think point 1 can and should be fixed. The question is how to do 
> it without spending a month in the process or fuzzying all the existing 
> translations. It probably needs to be scripted somehow and then the 
> patch for both winerror.mc and the po files submitted? (or just submit 
> the patch for winerror.mc and the script?)

I'm not sure that doing 1 without 2 is all that useful. If they are
supposed to be proper sentences and are not, they will look ugly with or
without full stop.

po: Remove extraneous full stops from the Japanese translation.

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Francois Gouget  writes:
> > You were right on both points:
> > - All these error messages have a trailing full stop in English, 
> > French and Japanese.
> > - They also tend to be much more verbose than Wine's messages and 
> > usually form a proper sentence.
> >
> > I'm not going to fix point 2.
> >
> > But I think point 1 can and should be fixed. The question is how to do 
> > it without spending a month in the process or fuzzying all the existing 
> > translations. It probably needs to be scripted somehow and then the 
> > patch for both winerror.mc and the po files submitted? (or just submit 
> > the patch for winerror.mc and the script?)
>
> I'm not sure that doing 1 without 2 is all that useful. If they are
> supposed to be proper sentences and are not, they will look ugly with or
> without full stop.

I don't think the messages below are more ugly with a full stop or even 
ugly at all in the first place.

Invalid address.

Service not active.

Media changed.

Property set not found.

That's why I don't plan on doing 2: I consider the current messages to 
be terse but fine, and I'm not convinced waxing eloquent like Windows is 
any better.

(I'm attaching my hack for checking the Windows messages, forgot to do 
it before)