For someone on Android - why do they have these constants at all? If people need to add metadata to remember who their contacts are, why not free text field?
Free text field is not machine readable, e.g. for Siri.
LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
201–210 of 276 posts
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if this is serious. I don't even know which language you're using but it is literally no different than mom's mom and dad's mom other than a space.
The point of the conversation is how people express these relationships in their day-to-day so they can be encoded in software. Would your grandparents' contact be saved on your phone as "Mom's mom" or as "grandma"? Probably the second, which is indistinguishable from "grandma" as "Dad's mom". In Norwegian, people would naturally call these "mormor" and "farmor" and they would expect that relationship to be correctly…
For day-to-day familiar conversation we generally use nicknames for grandparents in the US and that's what is in our contact list.
There are probably hundreds or thousands of nickname words for grandma based on a variety of cultural backgrounds, family tradition, and mispronunciations by grandchildren.
The language we use really depends on setting. In a more formal setting we might say paternal grandmother/grandparent. Speaking to a friend we might use the nickname, or we might say the ambiguous 'grandma' or we might say 'grandmother on my dad's side' or 'dad's mom'.
It really depends on the situation and familiarity and formality.
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#203If you are a native English speaker and are surprised a relationship label might translate with difficulty into another language/culture, consider: Brother-in-law It’s my sibling’s husband, OR my spouse’s brother. In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre.
>In many non-English-speaking cultures, that juxtaposition appears bizarre.
It only scratches the surface of how something very natural in one culture is bizarre or even abhorrent in another.
Promised wives? GM? Snokhachestvo? Washing dishes with cow urine? Sure let's just throw some i18n and she'll be right.
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
are there multiple languages that have this exact relationship concept? because if it’s in a single language or family of languages, the idea that it can be translates into something generic seems questionable
Urdu has even more discretization. Transliterated into latin characters * Mother's brother = mamoo * Mother's sister = khala * Father's older brother = Taaya * Father's younger brother = Chacho * Father's sister = Phupo Each of these's spouse also has a corresponding word. For example, Father's sister's husband will be Phupa. Then, their children are identified with a suffix. Mother's brother's son = Mamoo zaad bhai…
Huh! That's so interesting.
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#205Responding to a variety of questions made over the years about this: This is a constant intended to be displayed after localizing the constant . Its localized value will primarily be displayed to users whose preferred languages have a short word describing the relationship. But it ALSO needs at least some comprehensible localization in EVERY language, because I can send you a vcard for myself labeling this specific t…
> The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the [proposal] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement. I don't exactly agree. Note that this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them. In the other word this constant can…
I think this UI issue shows a problem in thinking about what the actual problem is that they're trying to solve.
This bug is about contact cards, and so the relationship is necessarily between you and the contact. So, it's not like you need to translate 表妹 into English, or differentiate it from 表姐 in English, as it's something you have chosen to describe the relationship. If you just think of them as "cousin" or whatever you use in your language, that's fine, just use that label. But, once you've assigned e.g. 表妹 to a contact, you don't need to translate that to English if you change your locale... because you already know what it means, because you chose it in the first place!
Admittedly, there's an issue when you receive a contact from someone else, but then you will probably be changing that field anyway. Unless we are family, you sending me a contact for your aunt is unlikely to also be my aunt, and if it is, well I probably also share that native language with you. I'm sure there are edge cases, like siblings who were separated when very young and the parents moved to different countries, or adopted, or found via DNA testing or whatever. But even in those few contexts, learning about the word or having the person themselves explaining the relationship to you, probably helps overall understanding of the relationship.
In any case, a lot of the Chinese words for the various familial relationships are quite amorphous. I remember being very surprised when a Chinese friend posted some photos on Wechat of her 孙子, literally "son's son". My initial reaction was "She can't be old enough to have a grandson!" then "Wait? She has a son? I thought she was single..." Turns out, she was referring to her brother's son. Lots of people use 哥, 弟弟, 妹妹, 姐姐 (literally older brother, younger brother, younger sister, older sister) to mean their friendship group, although this is probably a result of the impact of the one child policy. 阿姨 and 叔叔 (aunt and uncle) are just respectful terms for people of similar age to your parents, etc. There's literally no point trying to translate these names into their literal English meaning, because it will just further confuse people.
So, then the big problem becomes where these labels come from. Is it a dropdown box where only the options available in your current language are presented? How do you then choose one that's available in a different language if that's what you want to use? Presumably these aren't translated too literally into other languages, as e.g. an English speaker isn't going to want to choose one of 4 options for "cousin", and hopefully would be immediately suspicious of why their phone wants that much information about the nature of their cousin-ness, when it's customary to just use a single word. How then would that get translated back into Chinese? It would be embarrassing at family events if someone saw that the male cousin on my mum's side was labelled as female cousin on my dad's side.
I think it'd be much easier if you could just type what you wanted into this relationship field, maybe with a drop-down or auto-complete for likely options in your language.
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if this is serious. I don't even know which language you're using but it is literally no different than mom's mom and dad's mom other than a space.
It is Norwegian. And it is serious. And I am not saying the concept doesn't exist, only that as far as I am aware there is no usable everyday word for it. I mean: nobody will tell their kids they are going to visit dads mum and dads dad next week, rather than telling them they are going to visit grandma and granddad "across the country" or something?
"What are you doing this weekend, little Timmy?"
"One is repairing to the country where one will be enjoying the company of one's paternal grandmama and grandpapa."
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s surprising. I’d expect it to be “cousin” in English. Why would it be the more specific string? Is it just too difficult to do the i18n?
While you have a point, imagine the string appearing in a combo box or other list of relationship kinds. It would be very confusing to have multiple options that are all just "cousin". To solve both that use case and the ones you have in mind, the API could perhaps be extended with a language-aware "normalization" procedure that maps relationship labels in a way that loses information but produces a more canonical la…
That’s not the use case I imagine. When setting relationships in a Chinese localization this option appears with the correct characters in the dropdown. If that contact is shared with an English locale the attribute is still set but it displays as “cousin”.
Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#208Re: LabelContactRelationYoungerCousinMothersSiblingsDaughterOrFathersSistersDaughter
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The constant embeds everything that an English-speaking localizer needs to explain the relationship in a different language. That’s why something like the [proposal] (just use the Chinese name for this relationship) would not be an improvement. I don't exactly agree. Note that this constant embeds two terms, exactly because this particular kinship term does not distinguish them. In the other word this constant can…
I think this UI issue shows a problem in thinking about what the actual problem is that they're trying to solve. This bug is about contact cards , and so the relationship is necessarily between you and the contact. So, it's not like you need to translate 表妹 into English, or differentiate it from 表姐 in English, as it's something you have chosen to describe the relationship. If you just think of them as "cousin" or wha…
It's actually a relation between two contacts, not between you and the contact. The UI allows the user to link several contacts, e.g. link the "spouse" or "brother" contact to your friend's contact card. There's a set of predefined labels to choose from, and there's also an option to add a custom label.