On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 09:48:40PM -0600, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote:
> At one point Mark Weaver and I were talking about something like a
> special quasiquote that could be used for translations with gettext,
> since many translations are very tricky in situations like:
> 
> `(p "Download from "
>     (a (@ (href ,link))
>        "this webpage") ".")
> 
> The naive approach would be to have different translations for
> "Download from " and "this webpage" and (egads) "."
> 
> However this is called "lego translations" and unfortunately is nowhere
> near as elegant as lego... different languages have different
> word order so there is no safe way to "break apart" a translation like
> this into bits.
> 
> The right way to do it using a special gettext quasiquote would probably
> be like:
> 
> #_(p "Download from "
>      (a (@ (href #_,link))
>         "this webpage") ".")
> 
> or some such thing, which could then produce a string for translation
> that looks like:
> 
> "(p \"Download from \"
>      (a (@ (href #_,$1))
>         \"this webpage\") \".\")"
> 
> or some such thing.
> 
> What do you think about this direction?  It would require some new
> tooling, but I think it's the best way forward probably?

I currently use

(div (@ (id "content"))
     ,body
     (footer
      (div (@ (id "contact"))
           (h1
            (@ (class "contact-heading"))
            ,(_ "Contact me:"))
           (div
            ,(_ "Mail:")
            " "
            (a (@ (href "mailto:pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de"))
               "pelzflorian@pelzflorian.de"))
           (div
            "XMPP:"
            " "
            (a
             (@
              (href
               "xmpp:pelzflorian@chat.pelzflorian.de?message"))
             "pelzflorian@chat.pelzflorian.de"))
           (div
            ,@(__ "GnuPG key: ||gnupglink_|| (valid until \
||gnupgexp_||)"
                       `(("gnupglink_" .
                          ,(a-href
                           "/files/key.asc"
                           "0x4947055B"))
                         ("gnupgexp_" .
                          "01/27/2019")))))
           (div (@ (id "source-code-link"))
                ,@(__ "Find the source code for this website \
||link_|here||."
                      `(("link_" .
                         ,(lambda (text)
                            `(a (@ (href ,(build-url
                                           "git"
                                           "pelzfloriande-website")))
                                ,text))))))
           (div (@ (id "powered-by"))
                        ,@(__ "Powered by \
||link_|https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/|GNU Guile|| and \
||link_|https://haunt.dthompson.us/|Haunt||."
                              `(("link_" . ,a-href))))))



This works with existing Gettext.  Special syntax would perhaps be
easier to write, but I don’t know what kind of Gettext string it
should produce.  "Find the source code for this website \
||link_|here||." uses the symbols (well, strings) like "link_"
specified in the code.

(Note that I want a clear separation between Gettext and Scheme code.
This is not always desirable, but often is.)

Regards,
Florian