FreeGameDev

There are a lot of similar challenge descriptions, for example "Finish %d laps in %s with %d %s AI karts in under xx minutes.", "Finish with at least %d nitro points on %d laps of %s in under xx minutes." and so on. When the challenge parameters changed, the .po strings are changed, too, so we have to manually re-translate strings Is it possible to use some %d and %s to make this easier?

Hi,

this is a good idea, I'll take a note and see what I can do

You are suggesting the following:
trackname = "Farm"
easy = "easy"
AI karts = "AI karts"

Fulltext = "Finish %d laps in %s with %d %s %s in under %d:%d minutes."

Being a translator I see a problem. Whereas this is possible for most germanic languages, the syntaxis may differ so much that you run into problems. The %d, %s placeholders do not allow the variables to be placed in a different order.
Also you run into problems with inflexion of articles. In German "the track" is "die Strecke", but the posessive (e.g. "the side of the track") is "der Strecke" (e.g. "der Rand der Strecke"). I know similar stuff is present in other languages (e.g. Finnish)

asciimonster,

placing strings in a different order is always possible, simply insert %0, %1, etc... (this is only if you edit the po manually, Launchpad or poedit won't like them...) or %1$s, %2$s, etc... those will be accepted by PoEdit and Launchpad.

For inflexion of articles indeed this can be more problematic

I think it's a bad idea because in some languages the numbering is more complex than singular and plural.
For example in slovenian it's different form if it's 1, 2, 3 or 5 laps. A translator cannot know what number %s represents, so it increases a possibility of a mistake.
I don't think it takes much time to Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and change the time or number of laps.

Alright, I'm putting this feature request on ice, sorry acme_pjz

Well, it doesn't matter It's amazing to know there're such that problems in plural forms in some language ...