Hi, My wife and I sat down this afternoon to record Callweaver prompts in Hebrew. We spent 3 hours on it and we're still not done yet, though we're well on the way.
We've hit a problem though that I thought we would hit, that of grammar. Most prompts in Callweaver are complete sentences. but some, particularly in the voicemail application, are not, and here's where we hit trouble. Lets take the simple phrase: "You have <N> new message(s)." It's simple enough in English. We speak "You have", then if N<1, say "no" else say N, say "new", then if N<>1 say "messages" else say "message". I realise that we have issues like old messages to deal with, but this will do for now. In Hebrew, it's not so straight-forward. Firstly, you don't say "3 new messages", you say "3 messages new". We don't have a way to tell Callweaver to play files in a certain order based on the language. But it gets worse than this. Hebrew has singular and plural verbs and adjectives as well as nouns, so the word "new" that is used for "1 new message" is not the same "new" as is used for "3 new messages". And the final bit of confusion comes in when we find out that the word order is different yet again for singular. So whereas in English we say "<N> new message(s)", in Hebrew we say "message new 1" and "2 messages news". On this last point, I think that time measures like minutes and seconds have the same problem, but I'm not 100% sure about that (I'm still very much learning the language, having been in Israel only 5 months). Oh and it occurs to me that you don't say "You have no new messages", you say "You don't have new messages". One other potential gotcha is that Hebrew is a gendered language. So if you compare the phrases "3 new messages" and "3 new books", both "3" and "new" would be different in the second phrase because "book" is male whereas "message" is female. In our initial run through this translation process, we don't think we've hit this particular problem yet, as it would appear that the only thing we describe in the voicemail application is messages, and numbers in isolation are female as well as when used to describe a quantity of messages. Extensions are female too, luckily. A friend of mine and I were talking the other week and he told me then that this issue had come up in some weekly get-together the Asterisk folks apparently have. Apparently this was given as the reason why the Voicemail application couldn't be internationalised. It struck me then as it does now that the only real way to solve this is to have some way of specifying the grammar where this is needed, based on the values of certain variables, probably using some kind of basic scripting. Dealing with gender may be difficult, but I'm sure it could be solvable (maybe it could be possible to assign genders to things like extensions, messages, etc). Anyway, something for you smart people to scratch your heads over. I hope to have the Hebrew files available soon to commit somewhere, but of course the voicemail application will be grammatically incorrect in some places until this issue is resolved. Geoff. _______________________________________________ Callweaver-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.callweaver.org/mailman/listinfo/callweaver-dev
