On Fri, 2012-08-10 at 17:57 +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 5:40 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > Fair enough. I was not sold on doing that either. I would still like
> > to know if it's okay to use one string with %s for the cases where
> > there's not a good reason for the "context" to be more than just a
> > SQL keyword.
>
> Given that the SQL keyword is going to be an English word I can't
> imagine how this could be a big deal for translators. It might not
> match gender or case or something but only if the reader is
> automatically mentally translating the keyword into their language and
> then applying that language's rules to it. At least to me it makes
> sense to refer to "VALUES" as a singular noun or "LIMIT" as a generic
> male noun even though "limitation" would be feminine (I had to look
> that one up though so perhaps I'm not the best person to judge).
In some languages the grammatical adjustments do not depend on the
gender but on other aspects of the word, such as the last letter. So
it's possible to construct cases where this is a problem.
That said, you can usually work around this by translating something
like "cannot use aggregates with %s" along the lines of "cannot use
aggregates in context %s".