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cinternationalizationpo

How to translate "Unable to stat %s\n" in German?

I have a translation question but I am asking it here because I think it needs technical understanding.

In order to translate a program to German, I have this line in the .po file:

#, c-format
msgid "Unable to stat %s\n"
msgstr ""

What does this mean and how would I say it in German?

Solution

  • Here stat is a reference to the POSIX standard call of that name, stat(2).

    Perhaps you can take some clue from the manual page's description, the brief one is "get file status".

    My German is waaaay too rusty to suggest a translation, but inserting it into the English would give "Unable to get file status (stat) %s\n" (I kept the original "stat" phrase since it's highly-detailed technical information and might be useful).

    You could of course not try to work around the function name, and instead just say "The stat() function failed for %s", it's the use of the funtion name as a verb which makes it harder to translate, I think.