[Python-Dev] PEP 215 redux: toward a simplified consensus? (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
26 Feb 2002 00:42:41 +0100

Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> writes:

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.

Indeed. Therefore, the only true solution is to have an automatic check that verifies that the translated string has the same inserts as the original. Such a check could instruct users to follow any interpolation scheme; even if translators don't know the programming language of the application, they still are typically capable of understanding the error messages from msgfmt.

Regards, Martin