Re: copyright notice format

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

mån 2002-12-09 klockan 16.18 skrev Daniel Elstner:
> > As long as we cannot use UTF-8 in source code resp. as message IDs for
> > tranlation it's useful to offer those strings for translation.  The
> > translator can provide proper 8bit character within names and adjust
> > comma usage for the target language.  Example:
> 
> You can always use octal escapes for UTF-8, which is less hackish and
> avoids uglyness in case of untranslated strings.

But the copyright message still often needs translation, since it's not
uncommon that the author names need umlauts or other characters not
provided with plain ASCII, as Karl Eichwalder already pointed out. Also,
variants like:

"Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and many others"
"Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and Baz"

etc. need to have those last parts and the "and":s and so on translated.
Also, some applications use:

"Copyright (C) 2002 The Free Software Foundation"

The "The" usually has no place in other languages, so it usually needs
to be removed in the translation. In fact, the FSF wants to be referred
to as "Free Software Foundation, Inc.", so these messages should be
corrected anyway, but you get the idea.

In any case, since this isn't uncommon I doubt using an escape sequence
for the copyright symbol is going to solve most problems. We still need
to translate the copyright notices in many cases, and if an escape
sequence is used, that part cannot be used inside a msgid since gettext
doesn't allow that, so the messages would need to be split in two
halves. I don't think it's worth the hassle.

What *is* useful and directly beneficial is standardizing how the
copyright notices look like, which is how this thread started, so that
they both will be valid and easier for translators. There's many
copyright notices out there from what I've noticed that don't meet the
legal requirements others have already pointed out in this thread, so
standardization won't only help translators, but will make those notices
meet the requirements, which is beneficial to all.


Christian