Explain why entire sentences.

diff --git a/gettext-tools/doc/ChangeLog b/gettext-tools/doc/ChangeLog
index 7fc1618687fcd2fce3fa94fbcbac61d874b976d2..700fa858fad38493dabb91edbd6fa36a31b352a5 100644 (file)
--- a/gettext-tools/doc/ChangeLog
+++ b/gettext-tools/doc/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,7 @@
+2003-06-22  Bruno Haible  <bruno@clisp.org>
+
+       * gettext.texi (Preparing Strings): More explanations.
+
 2003-06-21  Guido Flohr <guido@imperia.net>
             Bruno Haible  <bruno@clisp.org>
 

diff --git a/gettext-tools/doc/gettext.texi b/gettext-tools/doc/gettext.texi
index 2b63384fd133502b3e9e575ffc9168810b79eea5..adae9f07132dc42cf6efd3abe2e9f353641bb5f7 100644 (file)
--- a/gettext-tools/doc/gettext.texi
+++ b/gettext-tools/doc/gettext.texi
@@ -1900,6 +1900,15 @@ also be able to find the appropriate grammatical construction.  The French
 translator for example translates "write protected" like "protected
 against writing".
 
+Entire sentences are also important because in many languages, the
+declination of some word in a sentence depends on the gender or the
+number (singular/plural) of another part of the sentence.  There are
+usually more interdependencies between words than in English.  The
+consequence is that asking a translator to translate two half-sentences
+and then combining these two half-sentences through dumb string concatenation
+will not work, for many languages, even though it would work for English.
+That's why translators need to handle entire sentences.
+
 Often sentences don't fit into a single line.  If a sentence is output
 using two subsequent @code{printf} statements, like this