On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 16:44 +0200, Jure Repinc wrote: > Tim Ansell pravi: > > 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 don't think we deal with people's names in any special way. We usually > just use the male form in the translation. I guess it is just too much > complication with names and gender. Okay. Do most languages must have a way to refer to people you don't know the gender of? I guess most of the time in the past it has only been specific animals which you can't immediately tell the gender of. Long distance communication with people you had never met was also very uncommon. Not knowing the gender of a person you are talking too is something which has only become common with the Internet. In Thousand Parsec there is the distinct possibility that player races might not even have gender as we know it. For example how would the following be translated? "The mighty Thinkolot of the evil brain dominatrix!". "Evil brains" might have 6 different 'sexes' or none! > But for other parts where there is a > finite number of choices to replace (like messages : Your > <type_of_object> was destroyed) we don't use the placeholder for the > type, we just use the full sentence and for each type the full sentence. For Thousand Parsec I don't just using the full sentences with number substitution is going to viable. The combinations is very quickly going to grow (probably something like exponentially). Any ideas on how to deal with this? I'm sure we are not the first to run into this problem. Mithro --- http://blog.mithis.net/ - Mithro Rants about Stuff http://www.thousandparsec.net/ - Conquer the Universe (and then some) _______________________________________________ tp-devel mailing list [email protected] http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/mailman.php/listinfo/tp-devel
