Hi!

A few days ago I was asking something in i18n list, but unfortunately the mail was so poorly written that no one answered. Let me try again =) I CC to fedora-devel-list@redhat.com because I think they might also be interested.

When we have strings to translate which are part of a script (I believe in bash) like this one:

#: /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions:441 msgid "Start service $1 (Y)es/(N)o/(C)ontinue? [Y] "

how should be proceed in respect to the answers expected by the script?

It seems that the script would expect either 'Y', 'N' or 'C'. Translating the string using as proposed answers the initial letters in our language for each word might break the script.

I looked at the script and, unless I'm mistaken, it confirms that it is not prepared for localization:

-------------------------------------------------------------------- # Confirm whether we really want to run this service confirm() { [ -x /usr/bin/rhgb-client ] && /usr/bin/rhgb-client --details=yes while : ; do echo -n $"Start service $1 (Y)es/(N)o/(C)ontinue? [Y] " read answer if strstr $"yY" "$answer" || [ "$answer" = "" ] ; then return 0 elif strstr $"cC" "$answer" ; then rm -f /var/run/confirm [ -x /usr/bin/rhgb-client ] && /usr/bin/rhgb-client --details=no return 2 elif strstr $"nN" "$answer" ; then return 1 fi done } -------------------------------------------------------------------- note: strstr is a function in that script that "returns OK if $1 contains $2".

Would it be a good suggestion to make a translatable string called something like $YES that would hold the possible answers for Yes ("Yy")? (and same for No and Continue)

I checked with other languages and all translate the string using that language's initial letters as possible answers. I'm a little bit puzzled since I think those translations will break the script, but I might be wrong, any ideas?

Thanks!

/Josep