Re: New module : GNOME Power Manager

[Hendrik Brandt <hendrik brandt gnome-de org>]

Am Dienstag, den 12.07.2005, 16:17 +0100 schrieb Richard Hughes:
> Guys/Girls,
> 
> I've been told to announce to you helpful people that I had imported the
> gnome-power-manager module into GNOME CVS.
> 
> If you want to translate any of what we've done so far (there's a 70%
> done German translation already) then it would be most appreciated.
> 
> If I've done anything wrong w.r.t. translations, then please let me
> know.

Everything seems OK, except of:

"Whether we display icons when they are full"
1st: You don't say "we" as a computer (except you're Borg ;))
2nd: You display icons when they (the icons) are full?

"%i minute" "%i hour" "%i second" (all singular)
This is a common mistake. For a word in singular it's better to write
e.g. "1 minute", so a translator can decide how to translate. In German
for example "1 minute" will almost translated as "Eine Minute" and not
as "1 Minute". The reason is the difference in the German grammar
between male, female and neuter words and the different inflexions.
E.g. 
English			German
"1/One"			"Eins"
"One Minute"		"Eine Minute" (female)
"1 Minute"		"Eins Minute" (which is wrong!)
"1/one man"		"Ein Mann" (male)
"1/one woman"		"Eine Frau" (female)
"1/one child"		"Ein Kind" (neuter)

There are similar problems in other languages, e.g. French and Russian.
It's not your fault, I think it's more a genreal problem and
incapability of the current translation methods. E.g. there is currently
no way to distinguish between different genders of word. A example from
the gnome-doc-utils package is e.g. the word "Author". In English there
is no determination if the author is male or female, but in German (and
a lot of other languages) there is.
I don't know if gettext is capable doing such complex grammar.

Regards,
Hendrik Brandt
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