Hi all, I suppose here should still be the better place to mention this. I have tried, some time ago, to start structuring the language translation process for Chamilo. The first and second (and only) chapters are available here: http://beeznest.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/translating-web-applications-lesson-1-string-identifiers/ http://beeznest.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/translating-web-applications-% E2%80%93-lesson-2-include-punctuation/
These might be obvious to some of you, but I'm pretty sure about half of us can still be surprised by the problems exposed. But the point I want to make here is from the second chapter: language translation can only be used well when it includes punctuation. Why's that? Not all languages work the same way ours do. The Arab language is known for being written from right to left. The Japanese language is known for using another kind of "dot" sign than we do. If you give a string to be translated, say, of "This action cannot be taken here" and you want to make this part re-usable in a similar context where you append "Instead, you can do ABC", then you will definitely have to put a dot in the middle. Developers generally do that by using the programmatic form: echo $language_variable1.'. '.$language_variable2; However, put in the context of the Japanese language, you would have an incorrect translation, because it should read: echo $language_variable1.'。 '.$language_variable2; See the other "dot" symbol? In some cases, you won't have the dot symbol at all in Japanese, because the syllable "カ" (ka) marks a question mark. So in fact, the language variable should always include punctuation (even when not absolutely necessary). The Arabic form brings another problem in the same context: echo $language_variable1.'. '.$language_variable2; ... would in fact have to be written ... echo $language_variable2.' .'.$language_variable1; Thanks to CSS, some minor elements of that problem go away, but you still have the problem of ordering your sentence. This is why all complete phrases should be translated entirely, even if it means repeating some elements. Also, when including a variable part into a translated sentence (like "You have saved 46 items.", you should always register the phrase entirely and include the variable part as a token, like so: $lang_variable3 = "You have saved %d items.". This "%d" symbol (%s in case of alphabetical string) should be replaced (I believe it is already) by the Chamilo 2 translations system. I'm making this point now because I'm seeing a few Chamilo 2.0 strings in translate.chamilo.org from time to time and I'm a bit scared of having to pass through all the translations again once we start translating to Arabic or Japanese. It is very difficult to roll-out a new version of language strings once it has already been translated into several languages, so it generally generates bad quality automated translations that we don't want to happen to any open-source software. Yannick _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@lists.chamilo.org http://lists.chamilo.org/listinfo/dev
