Strings with placeholders don’t include quotation marks so they can’t be changed per locale

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos]

Strings like [1] are provided to translators like this:

   %s not installed↲

… which is rendered in the program like this:

   "<snap>" not installed

… or in Spanish:

   "<snap>" no instalado

… instead of the correct

   «<snap>» no instalado

Not all languages use English quotation marks. [2]
Please include the quotation marks in the translatable string so that they can be customized to fit the typographical requirements of each language.

[1]: https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/cosmic/+source/snapd/+pots/snappy/es/10/+translate
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

Note we're not using "English" quotes (“”), but rather the ASCII "quotation mark" glyph, which is a compromise.

The use of guillemots is recommended but not obligatory in Spanish¹, and I think every language has their preferred quotations, including “foo”, „foo”, «foo», »foo«, ‹foo›, 『foo』, ...

And indeed we want to use different quote marks for different things (there's a bug about this somewhere, about using single vs double quotes for names vs examples IIRC).

In any case: yes we want to improve it. It's not just for Spanish. Nobody likes the ". We won't be getting to this anytime soon though.

1. http://lema.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=SSTAZ5sDyD6h59vijX

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

No need to mansplain. I’ve been translating software for more than a decade; I know my typography.

Better explain to me something I don’t know: why is this the first time a new placeholder “%q” has been needed? It confuses Launchpad (for instance, I can’t save this string https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/eoan/+source/snapd/+pots/snappy/es/3/+translate) and looks like over-engineering. Are you telling me that in Go you can’t escape an ASCII quotation mark in a translatable string?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

This won't be fixed in Ubuntu only, so what's the point with setting higher importance for Ubuntu compared to upstream?

When you find that the developers give something lower priority than yourself, one way - maybe the only way - to move it forward is to start working and, in this case, submit pull requests in the upstream repo.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

> No need to mansplain.

I was answering your previous "Not all languages use English quotation marks."

> Better explain to me something I don’t know: why is this the first time a new placeholder “%q” has been needed?

It's not the first time a language has a field specifier that's not part of C's printf. Python has %r for example, which means "pass the argument through repr()". Similarly, Go has %q which means "Treat as %s, but then pass it through strutil.Quote before actually printing".
It's a convenience.

[John Lenton (chipaca)]

strconv.Quote, sorry.