Tested with Swedish locale (sv_SE). When I start an application in RHL 9, for example Mozilla, I get a message in the task list telling the application is starting: "Starting Webbläsaren Mozilla" There are several problems with this from a localization point of view: 1) The "Starting" obviously isn't translated into Swedish. This seems pretty easy to fix, it's probably just a matter of enabling localization in the code, and using a translation project to attract translators and as a consequence translations (see http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#tp and http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/maintainers.html). 2) Concatenating strings like this rarely ever works in other languages, due to differences in grammar, word order, and capitalization rules. For example, it really should be: "Startar webbläsaren Mozilla" in Swedish since Swedish never uses uppercase letters in the middle of sentences unless it's a name. The Swedish example is just a very simple example, there most likely are more complex ones involving genders and articles in other languages. To keep things short, a statement of fact is that sentences can only ever be properly translated in full (more of this is explained on http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#split-sentences). Hence, the only proper solution to this problem is to allow every application to provide its own startup message (similar to how every nautilus view provides its own "View as" message, for exactly the same reasons).
The message is from gnome-desktop: gnome-desktop-item.c: description = g_strdup_printf (_("Starting %s"), name); It isn't done with strconcat, fwiw, and it is marked for translation. In any case, should be addressed upstream, as I don't want to take all the translations themselves in RH patches anyhow.
Done, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119254