Kaixo! On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 08:32:41PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> Not in that simplistic form. Programmers frequently compose > messages from pieces that fit together in the language and > context they are most familiar with, but not in others. Indeed. I very often have to teach my colleagues how to write translator-friendly strings. I have to say that things improved a lot compared to some years ago. There is still to do, and the new support of right-to-left languages opens a new dimension to the i18n support: now we don't onlmy need to take care of the user-visible text strings and the font selection, but also on the widgets layout, and the choice of symetrizable icons. (this is quite new, and we will learn better when user feedback will start to come) The dgettext() function is a very nice and powerful one too. Is still missing a similarly standardized function to provide translation context (currently those functions have to be reimplemented at the widget or program level); that is quite important as English, the language is used for source texts, is quite ambiguous; for example "Open", is it a just a descriptive statement (that could by an adjective in in Spanish, eg: "Abierto"), or is it the action to perform (in Spanish rendered by an infinitive verb: "Abrir"); there is also the classical "perform this every %s" with %s being "day", "week", "hour", etc. in several languages the equivalent of word "every" will change depending on the nature of what "every" it is. eg in Spanish: "tod_o_s los d�as" (every day), but "tod_a_s las semanas" (every week). etc. etc. > polite speech, That is another interesting thing. Not related to i18n imho, but rather to the kind of public the message is intended to. It is interesting how the way Spanish and French translations have evolved over the years; at the beginning free software were used by almost the same people doing the translations, the language level was very informal, in Spanish the using of "tu" was common, and even in French I saw some translations with "tu" when talking to the user. Nowadays, it is much more formal, neutral, as the range of people that can read those message has enlarged very much, they may be read by people we don't know, that don't share our culture. There is also a will to look more "professional", etc. -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese]
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