Fluent 1.0: a localization system for natural-sounding translations

Post by bzbarsky » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

chungleong wrote: post #33

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.

Post by zbraniecki » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #79

stasm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point and something that we've seen come up very often in building UIs. The good practice which we recommend to developers at Mozilla is to avoid splitting or nesting messages, because it makes it harder for translators to see the entire translation at once. We've taken a layered approach to designing Fluent: what we're announcing today is the 1.0 of the syntax and file format specification. The imple…

> `[one] 1 time *[other] {$clickCount} times` How does this work for languages that have more complex pluralization rules? E.g. in Russian it's "1 раз", "2 раза", "11 раз", "12 раз", "22 раза" and "55 раз" - the case depends on the number ending, with exceptions for 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Post by zbraniecki » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #28

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…

GNU gettext is a well working framework for i18n. For the sentence ordering we include all variables in the translations, but split translations on styles. We then give the translator the text in order of html appearance in source code for context. Translators can then rearrange everything but the variable across the string and also leave stuff blank when necessary. It's not perfect, but works in most cases. And in t…

Post by zbraniecki » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

ngrilly wrote: post #58

olau wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take the comparison at its face value, it's clear to me that whoever wrote it isn't really familiar with gettext, or deliberately talking it down. Yes, it's sort of ancient, but the problems mentioned can be solved. And using the source string as ID is a pretty clever trick. Of course, there are some downsides, but there are certainly also downsides with separate IDs. Having said that, Fluent looks interesting.

The downside of using separate IDs is that the developer has to "name" each string shown in the user interface, instead of just using the source string as an ID. And as you know, naming things is hard ;-)

Post by zbraniecki » Wed, Apr 17, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #81

chungleong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not "less than 100 ending in 2, 3, 4". It's "2, 3, or 4 mod 10, but not 12, 13, 14 mod 100". So for example "1002" is "few" in this sense (even though it's bigger than 100) but "14" is not, even though it's less than 100 and ends in 4.