Hi Benno,

I see nothing wrong with theses translations apart from the fact that they use different words for the same source message, of course :-). But the meaning is the same.

Those packages have been translated by several translators over a couple decades or so (I'm not so sure about the history of recutils though). I'm the last translator but I don't change previous translations unless an error is reported. I assume users are used to the messages as they are. If they don't complain, I won't change the messages.

More importantly, I very rarely cross-check source messages with other packages, even among packages I translate. Vim has no translation memory at all to assist in that task.

And yes, "regular expression" has two accepted, or rather, disputed translations in French :-)

Regards,

Frederic

Le mercredi 11 décembre 2024, 9 h 07 min 09 s CET Benno Schulenberg a écrit :

Hello translators of the French team at the TP,

Triggered by an upcoming release of the gnulib domain, I was curious whether messages from that domain were translated consistently across the various packages. I picked two packages somewhat at random: coreutils and recutils. At the TP I did the following:

msgattrib --translated --no-obsolete latest/coreutils/fr.po >cor.po msgattrib --translated --no-obsolete latest/recutils/fr.po >rec.po msgcat --more-than=1 cor.po rec.po | less

The latter command shows only the messages for which the msgids in the two files are identical.

What follows are some selected differences that caught my eye.

msgid "write error" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "erreur d'écriture\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Erreur d'écriture"

(Please ignore the trailing \n on the first message -- that is an artefact of msgcat, to divide the concatenated messages.)

msgid "preserving permissions for %s" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "conservation des droits pour %s\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "préservation des permissions pour %s"

msgid "%s: option '%s%s' is ambiguous; possibilities:" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s : l'option « %s%s » est ambiguë, les possibilités sont :\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s: l'option « %s%s » est ambiguë; les possibilités sont:"

msgid "%s: unrecognized option '%s%s'\n" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s : option non reconnue « %s%s »\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s: option « %s%s » pas reconnue\n"

msgid "%s: invalid option -- '%c'\n" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s : option incorrecte — « %c »\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "%s: option invalide -- « %c »\n"

msgid "Success" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Réussite\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Succès"

msgid "Invalid regular expression" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Expression rationnelle incorrecte\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Expression régulière invalide"

This one amazed me the most. Is there no standardized translation for "regular expression" in French?

msgid "Unmatched \{" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "\{ non apparié\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "\{ sans correspondant"

msgid "Invalid range end" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Fin d'intervalle incorrecte\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "Fin de plage invalide"

There are many more differences, but the above ones exemplify the basic patterns.

Now I wonder: would it not be preferable that such identical msgids get translated in an identical way across various packages?

Surprisingly, the last translator of the two files is the same:

msgid "" msgstr "" "#-#-#-#-# cor.po (coreutils-9.5-pre2) #-#-#-#-#\n" "PO-Revision-Date: 2024-03-27 15:24+0100\n" "Last-Translator: Frédéric Marchal fmarchal@perso.be\n" "#-#-#-#-# rec.po (GNU recutils 1.8) #-#-#-#-#\n" "PO-Revision-Date: 2019-01-06 17:05+0100\n" "Last-Translator: Frédéric Marchal fmarchal@perso.be\n"

Regards,

Benno