Re: Translation of numeric values (application gnome-schedule)

["Raphael Higino" <raphaelh uai com br>]

> > Would would become:
> >
> > At every first minute of the second hour of the third day of every
> > month, run ls
> >
> > gnome-schedule will, at this moment, translate it to this sentence.
> [...]
> > Unless we use multiple lines we cannot show it the way you propose. It
> > would look like this:
> >
> >
> > Untitled | At this hour: 2             | ls |
> >          | At this minute: 1           |    |
> >          | At this day of the month: 3 |    |
> >
> > This is as hard as [raw crontab] to understand
>
> No, it isn't. Au contraire, I think it's easier to understand than both
> the raw crontab and your example, which is a long and winding sentence
> that I have to read slowly and carefully to be sure that I understood
> correctly. The above table, on the other hand, is fairly easy to read:
> The important parts are visually separated and easy to see, with proper
> numbers, and not mungled into a long and tedious sentence.

I agree Åsmund. The way it is now it's too long.

> > What I mean with that is that the user still has to compute the actual
> > frequency using that thing we call 'his or her brains'. It's still not
> > something a human brain can understand in a glitch. Which is IMHO the
> > responsibility of a userinterface. Computers can be programmed to make
> > it supersupersuper simple for people. Lets use that capacity. Even if
> > that means putting some more efforts in our translations and
> > translation-related code.
>
> Neither your way or Cristian Rose's way relieves the user from the need
> to think. However, his is, IMO, less demanding.

IMO, something like the multiline example with some improvements would be
very readable for users.

I thought something like these:

<b>Untitled:</b> Run command "ls" at 02:01 of the day 3 of every month.
<b>Untitled:</b> Run command "ls" at 02:01 of the day 04/03 of every year.
<b>Untitled:</b> Run command "ls" every minute from 02:00 to 02:59 of every
Wednesday.

Maybe the first example doesn't sound good in English and should be "... of
the third day of each month." or something. In this case, the word "third"
(and the others ordinals) would make difficult the L10N work since it gets
different depending on the genre.

> > The usage of such multiple lines would destroy the purpose of gnome-
> > schedule: To simplify the system-schedule and to make it accessible for
>
> It's not simpler just because it doesn't have numbers.

Again I agree Åsmund. The sentence doesn't become easy to read without
numbers.

As a translator, I just couldn't finish translating gnome-schedule to
Brazilian Portuguese because of the problem with the ordinals and the genre,
and because I had no time to find someone who can help me with the Python
file lang.py. It's easier to translate PO's than having to code so the
program looks good in a language.

Regards,

Raphael Higino