Advice for translating collapsed lists?

[hadley]

How should I translate code like this?

paste0("Source: " , paste(links, collapse = ", "))

I can translate just the Source, but presumably languages have different conventions for this.

Also worth considering glue::glue_collapse() or similar, which can generate phrases like "a, b, c, and d"

[MichaelChirico]

I think gettextf("Source: %s", toString(links)) would lead to the most translate-able template.

glue_collapse() is a bit tougher... maybe glue_collapse() itself should get a domain argument?

Tangentially related: Gergey Daróczi also raised the interesting idea of using glue templates and gettext() instead of gettextf():

gettext(glue::glue("Source: {link_list}"))
# or
gettext(glue::glue("Source: {toString(link_list)}")

Advantages:

• This can help give the translator a bit more context if the variables are named well
• We don't need to fuss about the %1$s redirection templates which are pretty clunky

Disadvantage:

• Translations will stale whenever internal variable names change, which essentially makes the translations depend on private API in a small way. Might be moot in practice, I'm not sure how often these variable names tend to change when the message also stays the same.

[hadley]

I think you mean glue::glue(gettext("Source: {link_list}")), but yeah totally agreed. It's seems much easier to understand multi-component messages when the components are given named instead of numbers. I think that the downsides are small in practice.

toString() isn't localised either, but presumably punctuation is more consistent across (most modern) languages.

[hadley]

I asked on twitter to get a sense for how this differs. Here's a summary:

• For European languages, the "a, b, {or} c" form is common, but languages other than English don't seem to use the Oxford comma
• In Japanese the conjunction comes first: (aやb、c) = a {or} b, c
• In Spanish the conjunction differs depending on the context ("o", "u", or "ó")
• Latin adds the conjunction as a suffix on the last term

[hadley]

Comprehensive solution at https://github.com/rossellhayes/and

[MichaelChirico]

Looks great to be able to offload this to and. Should that be functionality in glue, though?

[hadley]

Yeah, I think it would make sense to either bundle the functionality with glue or with potools. It would be useful to have all translation related stuff in one place, but bundling it with potools would imply some packages would need to take a run-time dependency on potools and I don't know how you feel about that.

[MichaelChirico]

Right... it looks like and is more of a "recommended package" from potools perspective. With gettextf() potools would be basically agnostic to it:

gettextf("Valid arguments are: %s", toString(valid_args))
# vs
gettext(glue("Valid arguments are: {glue_collapse(valid_args)}"))
# vs
gettext(glue("Valid arguments are: {and(valid_args)}"))

So as I'm seeing it now, this could be Suggested & included in vignettes

[hadley]

Yeah good point. I'll leave this open to include in my vignette, but otherwise seems like there's nothing for potools to do.

[hadley]

Would have to think through the consequences of routinely using and() in glue strings; it would be weird to see Valid arguments are aやb、c if the rest of the string hasn't been translated.

[MichaelChirico]

Agreed... looks like, even for glue, the best approach is to recommend it (maybe in the glue_collapse() docs)