Hi Rafal, > > "when the month is used as part of a complete date" > > to > > "when the month appears together with a day-of-month". > > OK, I have posted this suggestion to libc-alpha: > > https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-01/msg00773.html
Thanks. As Carlos says, the manual can even talk about language specific things; it already does for the plural forms [1]. > > Ah, but translators will not look in the glibc manual. They read only > > the gettext manual. So do we need some text in the gettext manual as > > well? > > I'm not sure which gettext manual you are thinking about but > this gettext manual is actually a part of glibc: > > https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/The-Uniforum-approach.html I meant the GNU gettext manual [2]. > > In other words, is the %B / %OB distinction something that the > > programmer can do, and the translator is not bothered about it? > > I strongly believe that the format strings should be left for > the translators and the programmer's choice of a format string > should be correct for English but this is seldom correct for other > languages. This is not because of the genitive/nominative month > names but for the reasons like: > > - English often uses the month-day order, most of other languages > use the day-month order; > - many languages require a dot after the day number; > - English requires a comma after the day number if it is followed > by a year number; > - some languages (e.g., East Asian) do not have month names and > use the month numbers instead; > - and many more... Interesting. Thanks for these thoughts. I have opened a ticket in the gettext bug tracker to document these things. [3]. Bruno [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Advanced-gettext-functions.html [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/ [3] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52971
