Re: More "what do you do with..?" questions

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

tor 2003-03-20 klockan 02.00 skrev Duarte Loreto:
> By the way... "App" is a pain to 
> translate. We don't have a good short for app. "apl" (as short for 
> "aplicação") doesn't look good, so most of the time we end up having a 
> msgstr 3 times bigger than the original msgid...

I usually file bug reports in bugzilla for abbreviations like "app" and
other similar terms whenever they appear in messages.
There's usually no point in using "app" instead of "application" in user
messages, it just makes the language more hackish and non-user-friendly,
and makes it a pain to translate.
I already had something written about this in
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#pitfalls, but I've added "app"/"application" to the list of examples now.


> >Are you getting overlaps and overloaded words? I have heard that
> >package and packet often end up translated as the same word, for
> >example?
> 
> We do a lot of overloading, sometimes because it is needed, sometimes to 
> make UI look better. For instance, on the same po, we sometimes have 
> "e-mail", "email", "E-Mail", "Email" and "EMail".

I also added "e-mail" as an example now. :-)


> By the way... I take this opportunity to ask a question. How do you handle 
> situations where the msgid is "None" when your language has "sex". Because 
> sometimes the same "None" on a po file can be used for "No files" and "No 
> messages". For us, files are masculine and messages feminine, so we would 
> translate "nenhum" or "nenhuma".

Swedish has the same problem, although it is not related to gender but
rather a singular/plural distinction. "None" can be translated into
"Ingen" or "Inga" depending on whether it's referring to a single value
that is missing/unset, or several.
Usually we just have to investigate how it's used in the application at
runtime or in the source to know how to translate. Sometimes this
message is used both for singular and plural in the same application,
and then we (unfortunately) just have to treat every occurance as
singular or plural in the application.


Christian