Re: Formatting lists of things

[Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 12:38:13PM -0300, Raphael Higino wrote:
> Hey, Shaun. Good catch.
> 
> First a silly note (and question too): AFAIK in English you'd just use
> that last comma for disambiguation purposes, right?
> 
> On 6/22/07, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > I've run into a localization issue in formatting DocBook,
> > and I need some input from translators to decide how best
> > to solve it.  Let's say I have a list of people's names.
> > There could be any number of people.  I need to format
> > this as inline text.  So in English, I'd do:
> >
> >   Tom and Dick
> >   Tom, Dick, and Harry
> >   Tom, Dick, Harry, and Sally
> >
> > The names, of course, don't get translated, but the
> > commas and "and" should be.  So again, this time with
> > parentheses around the potentially translatable parts:
> >
> >   Tom( and ) Dick
> >   Tom(, )Dick(, and )Harry
> >   Tom(, )Dick(, )Harry(, and )Sally
> >
> > If every language works exactly like English, then I
> > can just mark three strings for translation: ", ",
> > " and ", and ", and ".  But my guess is that they
> > aren't all like English.
> >
> > So translators, please let me know hows lists of
> > things are formatted in your language, including
> > instructions on exceptions (i.e. in English, two
> > elements are formatted differently than three or
> > more, as above).
> 
> In Portuguese (at least here in Brazil) our lists just wouldn't have
> that last comma:
> 
> Tom and Dick
> Tom, Dick and Harry
> Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally

Same in Slovak (sk).

Regards.

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