On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 13:03 +0200, Jure Repinc wrote: > Tim Ansell pravi: > > 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?
> Well in Slovenian we do have a "middle" gender. But we don't use it with > names, only with certain objects. To get around unknown genders I > usually just prefix the name with type of name we refer to and then form > the sentence so that all is in accordance with this prefix word. For > example "The mighty Thinkalot" becomes "The mighty Thinkalot entity" and > then we just translate entity and the rest of the sentence to look > correct for the translation of it. In the example I was giving, "Thinkalot" was the 'name' of the entity - not a description of it. At least in English we don't write "The mighty JLP entity" - we could say "The mighty entity named JLP". Or are you trying to describe how you might translate "The mighty JLP" into Slovenian (where JLP could be anyone)? > So when inserting a name into string it is usually good if our > translators know what type (ship, fleet, planet, race, ...) this name > represents, so that we can directly use this type as prefix word. The type will probably be known, but there could be an example like. "The <name> <type> devastated your world <name of world>.", where <type> could be monster, ship, disaster? We could probably get away without substitution like that, but it could be a little annoying. What about the case if we build lists (in most cases these represent player inputted strings)? s = "The fleet (which consisted of " for amount, designid in fleet: s+= "%i %s " % (amount, design[designid].name) s += ") was completely destroyed!" Which the player could end up with something like "The fleet (which consisted of 12 Big Bombers, 2 Battleships, 8 Scouts) was completely destroyed." Mithro aka Tim Ansell --- 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
