Re: [l10n-cs] Date Format with month names in genitive case - your opinions?



On Mon, Jan 22, 2018 at 10:56:45AM +0100, Rafal Luzynski wrote:
Dnia 22 styczeń 2018 o 09:16 Petr Pisar <petr pisar atlas cz> napisał(a):

BTW, this ^^^^^^^ is incorrect in Polish but it only illustrates how common
this bug is.

That's because the whole date is an attribute in postposition for word "dnia".
And the "dnia" itself is not a genitive, but a locative. You would have the
same issue if you wrote "In January, Petr wrote" or "On Monday, Petr wrote".
This stems from the fact that one needs to translate the complete sentence.
Not isolated phrases and then glue the sentece from them. A common
internationalization misconception. But I recongnize it as a problem. We have
the same problem in Czech.

On Sun, Jan 21, 2018 at 10:54:52PM +0100, Petr Kovar wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:10:28 +0100 (CET)
Rafal Luzynski <digitalfreak lingonborough com> wrote:


So, what format specifier do you use when you actually want to format
a date? This is a rhetoric question, of course the answer is that such
a format specifier does not exist. But it has been decided to be changed.

If it has been decided, then questioning people who do translations is
rhetorical. Isn't it?

I'm unable to decide if the change is overall positive of negative. But
if it happens, it needs proper documentation in nl_langinfo(3), strftime(3)
etc. E.g. nl_langinfo(3) reads:

MON_{1–12} (LC_TIME) Return name of the n-th month.

If you mean the man pages then indeed, man pages are not part of glibc
project and they need to be changed separately. I'm going to file a bug
report against man today. On the other hand, the info pages are part of
glibc and they will be changed along. BTW, note that no current documentation
says that this month name must be in a nominative (dictionary, standalone)
form.

The problem is that a name of this month in Czech is "leden". Not "ledna". As
your name is "Rafał" and not "Rafała". Once people upgrade glibc, they will
rightfully complain that the translation is wrong.

If we properly change the documentation and articulate it in the release
notes, then it won't be a bug, it will be a feature.

With the proposed change it would return the non-dictionary form that cannot
be used a standalone label and that's wrong. Try running "cal" command.

True, there are some applications which will have to be changed.
cal is on my radar and I'm going to file a pull request today.
Other applications which need change are GNOME Calendar and GNOME Shell
(which also contains a calendar). Minor changes will be required in
date(1) command line utility but this is more tricky. At the moment
I am not aware of other applications, are you?

No, I cannot be aware of existence of myriad of application that I've never heard
about.

Also the reverse solution would be incompatible with what BSD family has
been using for about 20 years now [2] and what POSIX has accepted [2] about
7 years ago (but has not yet published).

I did not knew FreeBSD alrady did the change and POSIX accepted it. I'm glad
the change will be at least somehow portable.

-- Petr

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