Re: [Translation-i18n] Proposal for declinations in gettext

[Veronica Loell <lista nakawe se>]

Are you talking about machine translation here? From my perspective as a computational linguist this is not something that should be part of gettext, rather in the tools that use gettext or the tools you use to work with gettext material.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "autotranslation" in gettext merge? is only for complete clauses, not for individual words, yes? So this should not be an issue for gettext. For your translation memory and your translation tools that you use to work with gettext, now that is where this thought and effort should go in. I would like very much to see some serious translation tools getting generated in the free software community, but that is a separate issue.

Just a note, for Swedish, one would have to deal with compound words, for Finnish and other agglutinating languages you would have to deal with the agglutination etc. etc..  

Basically in my opinion, this is not a job for gettext, this is a job for the translation tools that you use over gettext.

- Veronica Loell

>
>Subject: [Translation-i18n] Proposal for declinations in gettext
>   From: Danilo Segan <dsegan@gmx.net>
>   Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 22:14:25 +0200
>     To: translation@iro.umontreal.ca
>     Cc: linux-utf8@nl.linux.org,  translation-i18n@lists.sourceforge.net, 
> GNOME I18N List <gnome-i18n@gnome.org>
[...]
>*Background:*
>Serbian language has 7 declinations of a word (nouns, pronouns, and 
>similar words), in recent discussions on gnome-i18n list I found out 
>that Finnish has 15, etc. This becomes a major problem when translating 
>"composed" strings, as in "move %s", where "%s" might be any of "queen", 
>"king",...
>
[...]