Re: Gnome-games and scheme

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2003-05-23 klockan 02.20 skrev Danilo Segan:
> As you probably know, this wouldn't work perfectly for many languages.
> 
> For instance, some languages instead of "onto %s" have "onto [modified 
> %s]", in particular, in Serbian one would have.
> msgid "queen of hearts"
> msgstr "kraljica srce"
> 
> msgid "move %s onto %s"
> in the case of "queen of hearts" in place of %s it takes the form 
> "kraljicu srce". It's probably like that in many other languages, at 
> least in Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian,...), and probably in 
> German, where the word doesn't actually change, but we have an "article" 
> which changes depending on the word. [So if it's "*die* queen of 
> hearts", it will stay the same "by accident", but if it's "*der* king of 
> hearts" it might become "den king of hearts" (sorry to all the Germans 
> for any mistakes, my german is long unused :-()]
> 
> With the current tools (gettext) I don't see how this can be solved, I 
> did discuss with someone about developing the mechanism to support this, 
> but we never came to the conclusion how to integrate it nicely into gettext.
> 
> This is just for the record, because here the only solution for Serbian 
> would be having 1000+ messages, and I agree that's unacceptable.
> 
> If I'm completely off here (what I'd love to be), please give me a hint.
>
[...]
> >I also believe it should work, yes.
>
> See above for the "counter-example".

Good catch. I didn't think of that, even though I know some German. Ok,
now we have our counter-example. :)

The question remains on how to solve this problem. Theoretically,
translating 1000+ very similar messages like this could be automated and
not necessarily very difficult, but the luggage in form of 1000+ extra
messages in the po files, let alone the extra code for it, doesn't
exactly make it appealing, nor realistic.

Perhaps the message could be rewritten. I'm thinking of examples like:

msgid "move the card \"%s\" onto the card \"%s\""

This probably avoids gender problems etc, since it's the card that's
always the subject and object now. Would it solve the problem for
Serbian too?


Christian