Re: Gnome-games and scheme

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Christian Rose wrote:

>tor 2003-05-22 klockan 13.49 skrev Callum McKenzie:
>  
>
>>It is a minor step up from what it previously was, you couldn't
>>even reverse the order of the rank and suit before :).
>>    
>>
>...
>  
>
>>There is another problem. Once the card name has been generated it
>>is usually placed in another string. Unfortunately it is just not
>>feasible to to produce strings for all 3136 possible "move card a
>>onto card b" style messages. I intend to make the basic card strings
>>of the form "the queen of hearts" so that at the very least the article
>>can be given the correct gender. This leaves a string of the form:
>>
>>"Move %s onto %s."
>>    
>>
>
>Ok. If you have the possibility, please add a comment above that line in
>the code so that translators know what %s and %s get filled in with in
>this case. Something like:
>
>/* Translators: The first and second %s are card names like "queen of
>hearts" */
>g_printf (_"Move %s onto %s", card1, card2);
>
>Such comments will show up next to the message in the po files and can
>be very helpful when translating.
>  
>
As you probably know, this wouldn't work perfectly for many languages.

For instance, some languages instead of "onto %s" have "onto [modified 
%s]", in particular, in Serbian one would have.
msgid "queen of hearts"
msgstr "kraljica srce"

msgid "move %s onto %s"
in the case of "queen of hearts" in place of %s it takes the form 
"kraljicu srce". It's probably like that in many other languages, at 
least in Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian,...), and probably in 
German, where the word doesn't actually change, but we have an "article" 
which changes depending on the word. [So if it's "*die* queen of 
hearts", it will stay the same "by accident", but if it's "*der* king of 
hearts" it might become "den king of hearts" (sorry to all the Germans 
for any mistakes, my german is long unused :-()]

With the current tools (gettext) I don't see how this can be solved, I 
did discuss with someone about developing the mechanism to support this, 
but we never came to the conclusion how to integrate it nicely into gettext.

This is just for the record, because here the only solution for Serbian 
would be having 1000+ messages, and I agree that's unacceptable.

If I'm completely off here (what I'd love to be), please give me a hint.

>>Does anyone have any ideas how to handle this nicely ? I would imagine
>>that since the strings to be substituted are just describing different
>>types of the same thing (playing cards) then it should be possible in
>>most languages. Does someone have a counter-example ?
>>    
>>
>
>I also believe it should work, yes.
>  
>
See above for the "counter-example".


>>There are also several strings of the form:
>>
>>"Move the ~a off the board"
>>
>>in principle it is possible to treat these individually, but it still
>>represents at least another 162 strings.
>>
>>In each case the ~a is the name of a card preceded by a definite article
>>so I would imagine that for the single card case it should be possible
>>to phrase things to allow the full string to be generated. Once again,
>>examples of why this wouldn't work are welcome.
>>    
>>
>
>Please put the definite article together with the subject, so you would
>have "Move ~a off the board" and "the queen of hearts".
>The reason is that some languages don't have the equivalent of a
>standalone definite article but rather use modifications of the actual
>word, and so constructions where "the" is seperated from the actual word
>are difficult to translate.
>  
>
The same issues as above would apply to this case in at least Serbian 
language.


Cheers,
Danilo