> > See this example, say you had a message which read, "You ship %s was
> > destroyed." and you wanted to say "Ship 1" was destoryed. You would
> > store ("Your ship %s was destroyed.", "Ship 1"). Then when sending out
> > the message in say Spanish, the message is converted to "Tu nave %s fue
> > destruida." and then insert "Ship 1" into the message.
>
> One warning here, about arguments. It is a bit complicated with
> languages like Slovenian. You see it can happen quite easily that the
> verb in the sentence and maybe even some other parts change depending on
> the gender or other property of the argument. So to avoid issues like
> this in KDE only numerical arguments are inserted into sentences. This
> way you only have to deal with plural forms (we have 4 of them). For
> other non-numerical arguments it is best to just provide entire
> sentences for all the possible combinations. Of course there should be
> no problems with names in arguments.
>
> Another thing to be careful about with arguments is that in many cases
> other languages have to change the order of the arguments or otherwise
> the sentence would sound unnatural or even mean something different.
Python has a nice feature which uses the following format
"Your ship %(ownid)s was destroyed by %(theirname)s. It was a glorious
battle and %(theirname)s sends you tribute of %(amount)s gold."
I'll eventually convert all the python strings to this format. It lets
you reorganise it in any way you want.
I'm not sure how we deal with stuff like %(theirname)s however. As your
translation may depend on if theirname is male or female right? How does
KDE deal with things like having to insert the player's name, or
similar?
I have tried to learn other languages in the past and have failed
miserable. So I need you to guide us :)
Tim Ansell
---
http://blog.mithis.net/ - Mithro Rants about Stuff
http://www.thousandparsec.net/ - Conquer the Universe (and then some)
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