About %s order problem

[Christian Rose]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 5:31 PM, tiansworld <tiansworld at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem I met is: when there exist two or more %s in a msgid line
> of a PO file,
> for example：msgid "Creating %s filesystem on %s". How to setup their
> order in a right way in translation.
>
> I use %1$s and %2$s to distinguish them in msgstr line.  But this
> didn't work, and showed
> error message:  fatal error 'msgstr' is not a valid Python format
> string, unlike 'msgid'. Reason: In the directive number 1, the
> character '$' is not a valid conversion specifier.
>
> I suppose that this is a PO file format related problem. The problem
> will cause some of languages(like Chinese) translation in a wrong
> order, and be misunderstood by end-users.
>
> How to solve this?

File a bug report against the application. Developers should use named
placeholders in Python code, so that the placeholders can be
rearranged by translators.

See the "Python" section in
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeI18nDeveloperTips (and other Python i18n
documents on the web).


Christian