[Freeciv-Dev] Localization: %s, %s, show me your secrets!

[Sini Ruohomaa <siruohom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm working on the Finnish translation of Freeciv, and was wondering if
there is some relatively convenient way of looking up what this and that
'%s' can become, and where the possibilities are (for translating them) -
the latter is mostly solved by knowing what %s can become and making a
little string-search I suppose.

I can find references in the code, of the 'pgiver->name' type, but unless
they're named something obvious, I fail to go any further than that. For
instance (can't find the strings I've had bigger problems with, looks like
my po/x needs updating again), what form is 'pgiver->name'? (eg. "Game:
You agree on peace with %s.")  Guessing gives 'the Finns',but what's the
difference with 'get_nation_name_plural(pgiver->nation)' then?

Another form of the problem appears when %s gets (probably) replaced by
only a handful of words ("it's either Engineers or Settlers"): if I could
locate where all those words were when translating a phrase which includes
them, I might actually be able to 'bend'(*) words. I'm after information
like 'all these (few) words bend the same way, I can just add an 'n' in
the end to make genetive'.  Eg. "%s report on the LARGEST Civilizations in
the World" (here the names were easily located, too) - I changed the
sentence to have the %s in its base form (come to think of it, I can't
quite remember why exactly I did that, maybe habit of avoiding bending),
and that required being able to translate all the names in non-genetive,
too.

The answer might be obvious, but I'm not hugely familiar with the code
(nor coding/C) so I haven't found it. I just had a half-dream (= your mind
goes around tiredly and you hallucinate about things you think about,
happens soon after sort of but not quite waking up ;)) this morning where
the po-file had turned into hypertext and I just /concentrated/ on the %s
and a list of 'these words, located there, looking like this, can replace
this %s' appeared, and the thought failed to leave me alone...

--Sini

(*) This is a relatively big problem for a non-analythical language. The
words like to change - if x is an object in a sentence, it looks a bit
different than if it isn't, and lots of prepositions in English are
replaced by adding endings. Eg. a fish: kala, I got a fish: sain kalan.
Finland: Suomi, to Finland: Suomeen. As a result, for the general
statements, I spend time avoiding having any objects in the sentence (you
might have a vision on why this is a bit hard). ;)

PS. I need to make my mailreader (index) window reeeally wide to be able
to read the subjects. Is a) there a way to in pine, omitting the part of
subject in square brackets, or b) it possible to consider having a less
descriptive and less space-taking identifier, like a nice and cryptic
[FC-D]?