%s waiting to discharge - translation

I think you can take it as 'using the battery'.

I agree it's a little strange - one of many such things in Linux!

WIthout looking at the code, I cannot be sure, but to me it makes sense from the following view.

The problem is that you are trying to estimate how long is left in the battery. WIthout knowing the drain rate vs capacity, (ie measure, drain a little, measure again), it will be impossible to estimate the battery level -> time conversions. The amount of time will be limited by the noise level in the power demand, and in the voltage measurement.

Perhaps from the programmer's view it makes sense, but from the view of a normal user it does not, so I think I'm gonna translate it simply as discharging. If You try to estimate something U should use string estimate/estimating which is also available in this package.

You may find the string right here and check perhaps what are their neighbours to have a brighter view of what we're talking about.
https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+source/gnome-power-manager/+pots/gnome-power-manager/pl/+translate?show=untranslated

i think it is just a poor translation into polish.

what do You mean by poor?? To short?? Senseles??

OK, i did a bit of digging and found this in one of the debian patches -- they don't like it either.

My original guess looks to be on the right track. You can probably change it to what you want. The comment to translators (such as yourself :) ) is:

TRANSLATORS: the device is discharging and we don't have a time remaining yet

So debian (and thus ubuntu) report:
%s (estimating...)

You should probably raise this as a bug with the gnome-power-manager people, and tell them to clarify that message.

---------------------- excerpt of debian patch below -----------

+diff -uNr -x .pc gnome-power-manager-2.31.90.orig/src/gpm-upower.c gnome-power-manager-2.31.90/src/gpm-upower.c
+--- gnome-power-manager-2.31.90.orig/src/gpm-upower.c 2010-08-17 15:30:31.000000000 +0100
++++ gnome-power-manager-2.31.90/src/gpm-upower.c 2010-08-25 14:54:19.291183081 +0100
+@@ -229,7 +229,10 @@
+
+ /* we always display "Laptop battery 16 minutes remaining" as we need to clarify what device we are refering to */
+ if (state == UP_DEVICE_STATE_FULLY_CHARGED) {
+-
++#ifdef HAVE_APP_INDICATOR
++ /* TRANSLATORS: the device is fully charged */
++ description = g_strdup_printf (_("%s is charged"), kind_desc);
++#else
+ if (kind == UP_DEVICE_KIND_BATTERY && time_to_empty_round > GPM_UP_TEXT_MIN_TIME) {
+ time_to_empty_str = gpm_get_timestring (time_to_empty_round);
+ /* TRANSLATORS: The laptop battery is fully charged, and we know a time */
+@@ -240,9 +243,22 @@
+ /* TRANSLATORS: the device is fully charged */
+ description = g_strdup_printf (_("%s is fully charged"), kind_desc);
+ }
+-
++#endif
+ } else if (state == UP_DEVICE_STATE_DISCHARGING) {
+-
++#ifdef HAVE_APP_INDICATOR
++ if (time_to_empty_round <= GPM_UP_TEXT_MIN_TIME) {
++ /* TRANSLATORS: the device is discharging and we don't have a time remaining yet */
++ description = g_strdup_printf (_("%s (estimating...)"), kind_desc);
++ } else if (time_to_empty_round <= 12*60*60) {
++ time_to_empty_str = gpm_get_timestring (time_to_empty_round);
++ /* TRANSLATORS: the device is discharging, and we have a time remaining */
++ description = g_strdup_printf (_("%s %s left"), kind_desc, time_to_empty_str);
++ g_free (time_to_empty_str);
++ } else { /* larger than 12 hours remaining */
++ /* TRANSLATORS: the device is discharging */
++ description = g_strdup_printf (_("%s"), kind_desc);
++ }

OK, I noticed that you created a bug (138383)..

This has led to a silly situation. The person you haver reported the bug to are the people who customise gnome-power for ubuntu. They in turn probably use the Debian packages as their base. These packages are where I got the above patch from. So from their point of view, this is already fixed.

The correct place to report the bug is from the people who actually write the code -- gnome.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=gnome-power-manager