Re: [L10N] Kickoff of translation for Git 2.10.0 round 1

Jean-Noël AVILA [off-list ref] writes:

1.  In config.c, the changes to the function die_bad_number tried to flatten the 
translated strings (no message building logic). I think it went too far, and 
the reason of the failure can be factorized so that we don't have to 
retranslate each time. I might be wrong on this one, but I have no example of 
language where we would need differentiated error reasons.

I do not have a strong opinion on this one.  I think it is an
attempt to avoid language-lego.

2.  in sequencer.c, there is a mistake in the original string to translate 
"Cannot revert during a another revert"

This should be corrected. Thanks for spotting.

3. git-rebase--interactive, in this_nth_commit_message and 
skip_nth_commit_message are not localizable,

As the "TRANSLATORS" comment alludes to, "This is the Nth thing" can
be rephrased to "This is the thing N" or "This is the thing #N"
easily, and if that form without ordinal is acceptable for many
languages, we should say that it is also OK in C-locale without
translation.  So I agree that the recent change was pointless (even
though the result may be localizable).

In an ideal world, I would imagine that this would be done by using
Q_("This is the first thing", "This is the thing #%d", nth) aka
ngettext, but

    (1) I haven't seen ngettext used from shell scripts; and

    (2) I do not think po files are set up to express "for this
        message, this language has 4 variants and here are the local
        rules to decide which one to use depending on the number,
        but the rules apply only to this message".  The Plural-Forms
        rule [*1*] seems to be global to a .po file, unfortunately.

so I do not think we cannot do it with ngettext().

[Reference]

*1* https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html