Re: simplelist and non-western languages

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Freitag, den 19.11.2004, 16:27 -0600 schrieb Shaun McCance:
> On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 16:12, Christian Neumair wrote:
> > Am Freitag, den 19.11.2004, 14:58 -0600 schrieb Shaun McCance:
> > > DocBook has a simplelist element, which has far from simple processing
> > > expectations.  When it has the type="inline" attribute, it's supposed to
> > > be rendered as an inline list.  So this
> > > 
> > > <simplelist>
> > >   <member>fe</member>
> > >   <member>fi</member>
> > >   <member>fo</member>
> > >   <member>fum</member>
> > > </simplelist>
> > > 
> > > becomes fe, fi, fo, fum.  Seperating terms with commas is pretty common
> > > to western languages, but I don't know how non-western languages would
> > > want this rendered.  Would it be sufficient to mark the string ", " for
> > > translation, or do translators need more control?
> > 
> > ", " doesn't seem to be enough. At least for RTL languages, swapping the
> > argument order would be desirable. My proposal would be:
[...]
> I don't understand why you would want to
> swap the order for RTL languages.  I'm not putting each member on the
> screen at pixel positions from left to right.  I'm putting them into the
> result document in document order.
> 
> Assume this sentence:
> 
> Here is the list: fe, fi, fo, fum.
> 
> If English were RTL, with no code adjustments on my part, it would be:
> 
> .muf ,of ,if ,ef :tsil eht si ereH
> 
> That is, they naturally reverse because that's how the document is
> rendered.  If I reversed their positions in the document order, then
> they'd end up going back LTR.

OK, so I was obviously completely wrong. If the current implementation
is RTL-capable, I don't see any reason for marking ", " or "%s, %s" for
translation.

Thanks for asking i18n geeks before adding possibly unneccessary msgids,
maybe somebody more competent will handle your question properly.

regs,
 Chris