Re: Grammar problems in gnomecal

[James Aylett <dj-gnome insigma com>]

On Tue, Aug 10, 1999 at 06:23:56PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:

[Word orders in sentence translation]
> > This is one of the things which makes localisation very difficult. As a
> > thought, if we were using libglade there (we don't appear to be, at any
> > rate), the XML interface definition could be localised. I have a feeling
> > that someone is going to start shouting that that's evil (and they may have
> > a point :-), but it does mean that this sort of thing doesn't have to be
> > bludgeoned into some horrible pseudo-language just so it will translate
> > better.
>
> Libglade will not help in this situation.  This is quite a difficult
> problem.  It might turn out that we need a date formating library that
> special contains special cases for different languages where translations
> are not trivial.  The only problem with this is that is that the library
> might grow quite large.

Erm ... possibly I've reconstructed this message wrongly and you weren't
talking about that at all. I'm talking about situations where you have:

[Every] [<field>] [bumpers] [day(s)]

as four separate UI objects (two display fields, an editable field, and a
pair of bumpers). In a situation like that, it strikes me that libglade with
localised interface files _would_ work. It certainly works in similar
situations on other systems ...

> > While we're talking about localisation issues, is there a way I can get
> > GNOME things in general to use British date formats (dd/mm/yy[yy]) instead
> > of US?
>
> As for date formatting problems, this depends on the application.  I
> noticed that gnumeric has an en_GB translation that corrects all the date
> formatting strings, so a good start is to set LANG to en_GB.  For other
> applications, you might not have so much luck.

Hmm. If I do this, it appears to break the date formatting options, so that
all of them format as d/m/yy; I just want it to recognise dates in that
format, but display them as (in this case) d-mmm-yyy (which is what I've set
for these cells in the formatting options). Is this a bug, or am I confused?

> If the application uses strftime to format dates, the simple fix is to
> make sure that the format string is surounded by a call to gettext [...]

Cheers,
James

-- 
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  James Aylett                                           www.zap.uk.eu.org
  james@tartarus.org                                    www.footlights.org