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Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

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Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#31

Post by arnsholt »

Tomte wrote: post #9
zoul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahoj! :) This is a perfect article that always comes to mind when talking pluralization: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Locale-Maketext/lib/Lo... We Czechs have it easy!

Great article! I'm always impressed by the thought going into Perl libraries. There was a presentation years ago, how Perl handled Unicode right and every other programming language didn't (with Python 3 pretty close, IIRC). Does anyone remember the URL?

I think the presentation you're thinking of is Tom Christiansen's Unicode: The Good, the Bad, and the (mostly) Ugly: https://www.azabani.com/pages/gbu/

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#32

Post by lizmat »

Tomte wrote: post #9
zoul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahoj! :) This is a perfect article that always comes to mind when talking pluralization: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/Locale-Maketext/lib/Lo... We Czechs have it easy!

Great article! I'm always impressed by the thought going into Perl libraries. There was a presentation years ago, how Perl handled Unicode right and every other programming language didn't (with Python 3 pretty close, IIRC). Does anyone remember the URL?

If it's about Perl 6, perhaps: http://jnthn.net/papers/2015-spw-nfg.pdf ?

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#33

Post by chungleong »

quelltext wrote: post #7

In the Czech example, how is it obvious that `few` stands for 2, 3, 4? Is that just how the concept of "few" (note the English term) is defined and understood by all Cezch speakers and thus this language specific meaning is encoded by Mozilla to map to the range 2-4? My point is that while there might be a concept of "few" that does map uniquely to that range, I am not sure naming the keyword "few" is the right name…

The rules for cardinal numbers in Slavic languages are quite complex. "few" is not just 2, 3, 4, but any number less than 100 ending in 2, 3, 4. You have to use a function to handle the situation. "few" is basically the function name, which is as good as any.

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#34

Post by madeofpalk »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #18
lewisl9029 wrote: post #15

One thing that I've always struggled w.r.t i18n is having to split messages up into often times less coherent chunks in order to add things like links or tooltips or styling elements in the middle of the text, which makes it more difficult to localize messages as a holistic piece independent of the source language. For a slightly contrived example to demonstrate this, let's say you have a string like this: "Please cl…

More and more, I'm starting to think maybe plain text isn't always the best abstraction to be using for defining messages for i18n. If messages were to be defined in terms of whatever primitive you're using to build your UI (i.e. React components if you're using React, and raw html template nodes if you're working with plain html), then all of this impedance mismatch might disappear. In the React case, a component or…

The problem here is tooling and workflows. Often you'll be using a SaaS product to manage translations, like Lokalise or similar products. At the end of the day, these just give you a whole bunch of strings to put in your app.

I've found this really hard. At my last place we just ate the cost (and ugliness) of included HTML in this strings and dangerously inserting them into the page.

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#36

Post by santialbo »

Looking at the examples, it looks like something like messageformat (https://messageformat.github.io/messageformat/) would have been a good solution to them. We've been using this at my job and we are very happy with the flexibility it provides. The hard part comes when a third party has to do the translations because someone from tech needs to be involved.

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#37

Post by Schoolmeister »

santialbo wrote: post #36

Looking at the examples, it looks like something like messageformat ( https://messageformat.github.io/messageformat/ ) would have been a good solution to them. We've been using this at my job and we are very happy with the flexibility it provides. The hard part comes when a third party has to do the translations because someone from tech needs to be involved.

From the article: "Many key ideas in Fluent have also been inspired by XLIFF and ICU’s MessageFormat."

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#38

Post by santialbo »

Schoolmeister wrote: post #37
santialbo wrote: post #36

Looking at the examples, it looks like something like messageformat ( https://messageformat.github.io/messageformat/ ) would have been a good solution to them. We've been using this at my job and we are very happy with the flexibility it provides. The hard part comes when a third party has to do the translations because someone from tech needs to be involved.

From the article: "Many key ideas in Fluent have also been inspired by XLIFF and ICU’s MessageFormat."

Thank you for pointing out. I found a comparison wiki article. I think this is an improvement over messageformat. They have tackled many of the issues with mf I didn't even know I had :P

Re: Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

#39

Post by cpfohl »

Khol wrote: post #19
anbop wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money is a company losing because its Korean string is nonsense?

Think about how often the english documentation coming with cheap products from china is mocked - do you really want your professional output to be treated in the same regard?

No, but if it comes down to writing better translation code, or adding features and bug fixes, I know where my clients typically land.
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