Re: Grammar problems in gnomecal

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Libglade will not help in this situation.  This is quite a difficult
problem.  It might turn out that we need a date formating library that
special contains special cases for different languages where translations
are not trivial.  The only problem with this is that is that the library
might grow quite large.

As for date formatting problems, this depends on the application.  I
noticed that gnumeric has an en_GB translation that corrects all the date
formatting strings, so a good start is to set LANG to en_GB.  For other
applications, you might not have so much luck.

If the application uses strftime to format dates, the simple fix is to
make sure that the format string is surounded by a call to gettext (the
_() macro).  Then it should be a simple matter of creating a simple en_GB
translation that only contains the fixed date formatting strings.  If you
find an application that does not allow you to set a translation for the
date format string, consider making a patch to send the author.  You could
also send the en_GB translation with it.

As an example of what to change, on line 146 of
gnome-core/help-browser/history.c, you should change:
  strftime(buf1, sizeof(buf1), "%b %d, %Y %H:%M", tstruct);
to:
  strftime(buf1, sizeof(buf1), _("%b %d, %Y %H:%M"), tstruct);

That should be all that is required.

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, James Aylett wrote:

> This is one of the things which makes localisation very difficult. As a
> thought, if we were using libglade there (we don't appear to be, at any
> rate), the XML interface definition could be localised. I have a feeling
> that someone is going to start shouting that that's evil (and they may have
> a point :-), but it does mean that this sort of thing doesn't have to be
> bludgeoned into some horrible pseudo-language just so it will translate
> better.
> 
> While we're talking about localisation issues, is there a way I can get
> GNOME things in general to use British date formats (dd/mm/yy[yy]) instead
> of US?
> 
> James
> 
> -- 
> /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
>   James Aylett                                           www.zap.uk.eu.org
>   james@tartarus.org                                    www.footlights.org
> 
> 
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