Christian Rose wrote:
And what's worse is that even a context system wouldn't really solve the Evolution problem, because the fundamental problem is that there is only one "New" menu entry. I've thought about this and a slightly better solution would be to improve the menu contents to at least be self-contained inside the "New" menu:
New -> New Mail Message Ny -> Nytt e-postmeddelande New -> New All Day Appointment Ny -> Nytt heldagsm�te New -> New Contact Ny -> Ny kontakt New -> New Contact List Ny -> Ny kontaktlista New -> New Appointment Ny -> Nytt m�te New -> New Meeting Ny -> Nytt sammantr�de New -> New Post Message Ny -> Nytt postmeddelande New -> New Task Ny -> Ny uppgift New -> New Folder Ny -> Ny mapp New -> New Shortcut Ny -> Ny genv�g New -> New Evolution Window Ny -> Nytt Evolutionf�nster
couldn't this be handled a bit similarly to plural forms?
There would probably be a few ways available for doing it, but they's all have to handle context one way or the other.
Baking all possible combinations into the po files themselves would probably make them bloated.
Having programmers cater for all different situations in 70 odd languages doesn't seem ideal either.
Perhaps there's need for some kind of language specific rule files?
This, while still keeping the design with one common "New" menu, would at least make the text information more clear since at least the menu entries can use correct language.
We should probably file a bug about this, as this is a fundamental design problem in Evolution that affects every single language that has genders.
This "New" problem will probably not be the last that needs special care. Switching from "New" to some other expression, like e. g. "Create" would probably only break consistency and move the problem on to some other languages.
Is it possible to solve this kind of problem well without a "linguistically aware" system, like gettext seems to be evolving into?
Perhaps this simplified example how it may perhaps be done (g for gender) could be a step on the way, before breaking out simplified languages rules into separate files:
E. g. in po: msgid "New" msgstr [g1] "Ny" msgstr [g2] "Nytt" ... msgid "Mail Message" msgstr [g2] "e-postmeddelande" ... msgid "Contact" msgstr [g1] "kontakt"
Apologies for bungling po's, it's monday morning ... .
Oh, and BTW: "New" is the same in English for plurals as well, which is not the case in many languages... and so on with all its linguistic implications. I'll leave combining this suggestion with plural forms al. to the reader .
BR, Gudmund
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