El Lun 23 Ene 2006 11:14, Matthew Marshall escribió: > On Monday 23 January 2006 08:05, Stéphane Magnenat wrote: > > I want to keep the fallback, because otherwise a release can be > > blocked by missing translations. > > I think that what Leo was saying is to have a _blank_ translation > be a fallback. (Not only a missing translation.)
There's another issue: sometimes a translation *should* be empty. So I think the best behaviour is this: 1) If there is a translation defined in an texts.XX.txt file, use it, even if it is empty. 2) If there is a missing translation, use the English one as a fallback. The difference with the current behaviuor is that currently a defined but empty translation is not used, but instead the English fallback is. An example follows: texts.en.txt: [1] one [2] two [3] three texts.es.txt: [1] uno [2] When looking for a Spanish translation for [1], "uno" should be used, because it exists in texts.es.txt. When looking for a translation for [2], an empty string should be used, because [2] exists in texts.es.txt even thought it is defined as an empty string. Finally, when looking for a translation for [3], "three" should be used, because [3] is not defined and so, the fallback mecanisim should take place. It happened to me that I wanted to translate a sentece the game displays by concatenating a few strings that one of the strings needed to be empty, however, I couldn't do that because the game instead displayed the English translation for that string. Of course I could do ugly-looking things like putting a space instead of an empty string but I shouldn't. I think it was the "of which n are looking for a job" thing, which is a sentence the game builds by concatenating "of which", the number, and "looking for a job". I can translate it into Spanish as: "of which" -> de los cuales "looking for a job" -> están buscando trabajo ...to make up the sentence like: "de los cuales n están buscando trabajo". However, an alternate, valid expression of that sentence is "n de los cuales están buscando trabajo", which I could get if I translated: "of which" -> (empty string) "looking for a job" -> de los cuales están buscando trabajo In spite of my intentions, the game would display this: "of which n de los cuales están buscando trabajo". The bottom line is: "There meed to be a way of distinguish an empty translation from an undone translation". Perhaps a more translator-friendly way of organizing the translatable strings might be in this case: [of which %d are looking for a job] and let the translator translate the whole sentence, for one cannot asume that all languages will have some text, the number, and a little more text as a translation of "of which n are looking for a job". It would requiere to repeat "of wich" in some 2 or 3 places, but I consider it a feature, as there are languages in which "of which" is translated differently acording to context, grammatical gender and grammatical number. Spanish is one such language, and I was just lucky that "trabajador" (worker) and "guerrero" (warrior) are both masculine, so the same "de los cuales" can work for both. But if one of "trabajador" or "guerrero" were femenine, I would have needed to translate "of which" as "de las cuales" in one case, and "de los cuales" in the other which, in the current organization os strings, is not possible. I can look for cases of yuxtapositioning of translatable strings in the code and convert them to whole sentence strings like the above, but it would render all translations not up-to-date. Please advice. -- Herr Groucho ID Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Señal distintiva: LU5MJR - 144,550 MHz FM. Clave pública GPG: hkp://pks.lugmen.org.ar Fingerprint GPG: B7BD 0FC7 D9A2 66F3 4EFC 45EE 7DE2 3932 597B 6354 _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel
