Re: Translating "yes" and "no" as answers to specific questions

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

Op Maandag 2008-04-07 skryf Thomas Thurman:
> I was working the other day on bug 335763, which allowed zenity yes/no 
> dialogues to have arbitrary text on the "yes" and "no" buttons.  It 
> occurred to me today that this is actually a more general problem for 
> yes/no dialogues in languages where the answers to such questions depend 
> on the verb used.  (I know Irish and Welsh have this feature.)
> 
> For example, from gossip:
> 
> msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
> msgstr "A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?"
> 
> Creating a dialogue with gtk_message_dialog_new() will give us buttons 
> called "Ie" and "Nage", which are generic unfocussed yes/no words.
> 
> I am turning over whether gettext might be appropriately extended to 
> something like, perhaps
> 
> #, yes-no
> msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
> msgstr "A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?"
> msgstr[y] "Oes"
> msgstr[n] "Nac oes"

-1

> or possibly we might extend gtk so that the message_format string can 
> (perhaps if passed a special flag) contain yes/no text for the buttons 
> as appropriate, which would require minimal changes anywhere else:
> 
> msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
> msgstr ""
> "A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?%(Oes)yb%(Nac oes)nb"

-1

> The second is my preferred option out of the two.  It doesn't look hard 
> to implement, either.
> 
> Thoughts?  Would this be useful outside the Celtic languages?
> 
> peace
> 
> T

This won't be needed for any of the languages that I am familiar with,
but if it can increase the quality for other languages, we should
consider it, I guess.

I would really want to encourage you to keep things as simple as
possible. If you want a different translation for "yes" depending on
context, this is what msgctxt is meant for. Use msgctxt to specify the
unique context ("have"?), and provide a comment to explain to
translators what the issue is. I don't want to be the one explaining
"%(Oes)yb%(Nac oes)nb" to a non-technical translator through our second
or third languages:-)  It is non-intuitive and makes automatic quality
assurance very difficult.

Friedel