[Python-Dev] PEP 215 redux: toward a simplified consensus?
Skip Montanaro
skip@pobox.com
Mon, 25 Feb 2002 17:16:24 -0600
SM> What do you mean by "translators"?
BAW> Someone who is fluent in a natural language other than English, and
BAW> translates a catalog of English source strings to a target
BAW> non-English natural language. E.g.
BAW> "No such list: %(listname)s" -> "Non esiste la lista: %(listname)s"
So translators aren't programmers either. Just tell them anything between
%(...) and the first alphabetic character after that is off-limits. Again,
it doesn't look to me like a programmer problem.
Just to play the devil's advocate (and ignoring the bit about $-strings not
being i18n-friendly), I suspect non-programming translators would have just
as much trouble with something like
$"Please confirm your choice of color ($color)..."
"$color" will look like a word to be translated. You would have to tell
them "don't translate anything immediately following a dollar sign up to,
but not inluding the next character that can't be part of a Python
identifier." Seems either a bit error-prone or confusing to me if I pretend
I'm not a programmer.
Skip