Re: Problem localizing xref generated text in help docs

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 19:16, Pauli Virtanen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am currently attempting to translate a bit of Gnome's help Docbook
> documentation to Finnish, but bumped recently into a slight problem with
> the <xref> tag.
> 
> In brief, the text generated by <xref> breaks Finnish sentences, and I
> am not aware of any other way to create automatically numbered
> cross-references.

In GNOME 2.10, I'll hopefully have gnome-doc-utils ready, and Yelp will
be using that for the DocBook transformations.  I've been working on a
more flexible translation system in gnome-doc-utils than what Yelp has.

We can use specialized role hints on the xrefstyle attribute to allow
translations to vary their output correctly.  What I'd like to do is to
develop a set of role keywords that will serve all the languages.  The
grammatical roles for such a noun in English are subject, direct object,
indirect object, and object of the preposition.  I know German has both
accusative and dative prepositions, as well as genitive.  A dedicated
header form would also be needed.

In practice, I don't think we need all possible grammatical forms for
labels.  I can't think of anywhere where I'd use one as an indirect
object, for instance.

A list of necessary forms in various languages would be really helpful
to me.  So I know that Finnish needs one form for the subject, and one
form for the object of a preposition (roughly speaking, at least).

So, translaters, what does your language need?  If everybody sends me
their requirements, I can get the whole system designed correctly.

--
Shaun