81–90 of 257 posts
Side note: as you might expect, Wikipedia's internationalization is the only system that attempts to do quantities and other formatting correctly for every goddamn language on the planet , but is considerably easier for translators to work with than the OP's examples (sorry, Sean ;) I did some work on bringing it to JavaScript and making it HTML-aware, and since then Santhosh Thottingal has vastly extended it and it'…
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How does ngettext handle "Your query matched %g files in %g directories"?
With reordering syntax. https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/c_002d...
Slightly OT, mi favourite localization error was in Ubuntu when they had that nice netbook interface (that later would become Unity). The network icon label was "Rojo" in the Spanish localization, that is the word for "red" color. What? Well, if you translate "Net" to Spanish you get "Red"; and if you translate that again (by mistake), you get "Rojo". There you are :)
That's an error only an amateur translator would make. Guess who makes free software translations... A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context.
From my experience with both software and movies, that's exactly what a professional, paid translator does (or is forced to).
Amateurs at least watch the movie/run the software before translating things, which is something I definitely cannot say about "professionals" translating movies and software to my language.
Funny how Slovene seems to tick all the complications checkboxes :D We have 4 grammatical numbers (singular, dual, plural for 3 and 4, plural for 5 and above), they repeat at mod 100 (so 101 is singular, 102 dual,…), it's an inflectional language with 3 grammatical genders, sentence should take a different form depending on whether the user is male or female,…
Wikipedia mention only singular, dual and plural ? What is the one for 3 and 4 ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_grammar
"Are you sure you want to quit?" in Slavic language will have gender of the user embedded. You need to know it to adress user correctly.
You can do stilted "To the person that uses this program - are you sure you want to quit?", but that's insane. So everybody just use male version.
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That's an error only an amateur translator would make. Guess who makes free software translations... A professional translator makes sure to check the context of the translation, it doesn't go blindly translating sentences and words without context.
To be fair it was a beta of the "Ubuntu Netbook Remix" and that bug was shortly fixed. I took some screenshots because I really liked the interface, but none of them show the bug because I usually stick to en_GB and the problem was spotted in my wife's netbook (she's Spanish teacher and likes to have the OS interface in Spanish to amuse the kids).
This coming from someone doesn't speak English as their first language.
I speak Romanian, Hungarian and English perfectly but my devices are always in English since it would be harder to figure out what they mean otherwise unless you have the structure memorized already.
Edit: Disregard, turns out things have improved > The %g slots are in an order reverse to what they are in English. You wonder how you'll get gettext to handle that. I learned C/++ after C# and this is one thing that really got to me. String interpolation in C++ is extremely primitive, which would be fine only if more recent iterations of stdlib had something that wasn't so completely incompetent. For those who don't…
The article is outdated. Gettext does have reordering syntax. https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/c_002d...
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Thanks for bringing back to my mind where I snatched this one up! Yep, it's Ender's Game. :) What is the meaning of the Chinese (?) symbol?
Japanese; you put it on the end of a statement to make it a question instead, e.g. "the server is up to date, ne?" to mean "is the server up to date?"
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I was just trying to think of how it would work out in Polish.... directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be: 1 katalog 2 katalogi 3 katalogi 4 katalogi 5 katalogów 6 katalogów ....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5) But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say: ....1 katalogu ....2 katalogach ....3 katalogach ....1000 katalogów (for 1001 even I am not…
ICU's messageformat solves this easily. One project that supports ICU's messageformat is L10ns http://l10ns.org
Another thing is that the mini-language grows complex enough that the resulting text can be quite hard to read and understand:
{people, plural, offset:1 =0{No one went.} =1{{user1} went.} =2{{user1} and {user2} went}.} other{{user1} and # others went}}.