Re: Get rid of translation strings that only contain punctuation

On Wed, Apr 22, 2026 at 10:30 AM David Rowley <dgrowleyml(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> (Follow-on work from [1])
>
> We've got a few parts of the code that translate strings that contain
> only a single punctuation character. I'm not a translator, but I
> suspect that these would be tricky to deal with as such short strings
> could be used for various different things, and if the required
> translation was to differ between requirements, then you're out of
> luck.
>
> I looked at: git grep -A 1 "msgid \", \"" and I see French is the only
> translation to do anything different with the ", " string, and only in
> psql.
>
> src/bin/psql/po/fr.po:msgid ", "
> src/bin/psql/po/fr.po-msgstr " , "
>
> This is used for suffixing "unique" or "unique nulls not distinct". I
> adjusted the logic there to get rid of the short translation string.
>
> Quite a few are new to v19: fd366065e (AmitK), 48efefa6c (AmitK),
> 0fc33b005 (PeterE)
> The relation.c one is from v18: 8fcd80258 (AmitK)
> The describe.c one is from v15: 94aa7cc5f (PeterE)
>
> Should we get rid of these?
>

This question overlaps with another thread of mine [1].

There, I was told that a punctuation double-quote (") *should* be translated.

OTOH, I did not see why the comma separator (,) should be translated
-- my patch did so only to be the same as existing code.

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[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHut%2BPui7RaQ8OfJEVn2ry-ykjnGc%2B3ujsFmcHDFw9FsXw_tRw%40mail.gmail.com

Kind Regards,
Peter Smith.
Fujitsu Australia