That is a wrong assumption, in my opinion. Hindi speaking people and people of many other Indian languages will treat "chair" as feminine gender, and will quietly laugh at anybody giving it another gender. For any indivdual, to speak otherwise, would be considered a handicap, but for a person claiming to be a translator, it would be considered an unforgiveable crime. Navin ----- Original Message ----- From: Kadal Amutham Sent: 06/17/13 12:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Gender and variables
In India, Hindi and other languages has this gender problem. My knowledge of Hindi is very poor. I can keep track of this gender. I do not know whether chair is feminine or masculine. So I speak without the botheration and put some gender. And people, who listen, very well know my handicap and accept it. Similar technique can be adapted here. Do not bother much for the gender. Let translator assign whatever s/he wishes. With Warm Regards V.Kadal Amutham 919444360480 914422396480 On 17 June 2013 01:06, Andrea Pescetti <[email protected]> wrote: > RGB ES wrote: > >> translate "%1 selected". The text was translated as "%1 marcado", >> which on Spanish is OK if %1 refers to a rectangle (m), but not to a line >> (f): "line" should be "marcada". I think that Italian, French, Portuguese >> and all other Latin derived languages have the same problem because gender >> is indicated by declinations at the end of the word. >> > > It's an interesting problem. I cannot see a way to address it in general, > unless our tooling has some hidden capabilities that I'm not familiar with. > > As a (post-4.0, of course, as you suggested!) cleanup phase, we could try > to: > - "Neutralize" the expressions in English ("%1 selected" -> "Selection: > %1"; when this makes sense of course; I haven't looked at this specific > string) > - "Generalize" translations: not really something that I love, but we > would use a wording covering all cases when translating. So, like in > English you would write "%NUM object(s) selected" to cover both the cases > where you have one object and more than one object, in Italian you would > translate "%1 selected" as "%1 selezionato/a". It seems quite cumbersome, > but it may work for strings that are not very prominent. > > Regards, > Andrea. > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: l10n-unsubscribe@openoffice.**apache.org<[email protected]> > For additional commands, e-m ail: [email protected].**org<[email protected]> > >
