Re: inconsistent translations, or the language is like that?

On 2019-May-16, Ioseph Kim wrote:

Hi, thanks for replying so quickly.

> The exact Korean expression is 'INSERT RETURNING 구문을 수행할 수 없음'.
>
> perform has same meaming for '구성' and '수행'.
>
> and '없음' is abbreviated to '없습니다'.

I see :-)

> I'll change it in the next version. thanks.
>
> I am more curious why you are interested in this matter. :)

Well, I'm considering changing the way those three error messages are
emitted by the server, so that the three cases use the same code. So
the translator would only get this string in the translation file:

"cannot perform %s on relation \"%s\""

instead of getting three strings. Then the program would substitute the
first %s by INSERT RETURNING, UPDATE RETURNING, or DELETE RETURNING
depending on which case is hit.

So I was searching for occurrences of those three messages in the
existing translations, looking for any where the three translations
were not identical, and Korean was the first I found.

After sending, I realized that the translations for simplified Chinese and
Turkish of the three phrases are also different!

simplified Chinese:

msgstr "无法在关系\"%s\"上执行INSERT RETURNING "
msgstr "无法在关系\"%s\"执行UPDATE RETURNING"
msgstr "无法在关系 \"%s\"上执行DELETE RETURNING"

Turkish:

msgstr "\"%s\" nesnesinde INSERT RETURNING yapılamaz"
msgstr "\"%s\" nesnesinde UPDATE RETURNING yapılamaz"
msgstr "\"%s\" nesnesi üzerinde DELETE RETURNING işlemi yapılamaz"

I don't speak (or even read) either of these languages so can't tell
whether the translations are just different because there are two ways
of writing the same thing (so my proposed change would not cause a
problem), or the languages have inflection or grammatical rules that
make the phrases be different (which makes my proposed change not
acceptable).

My preliminary conclusion is that I shouldn't be changing this.

--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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