Describing nouns (was: Re: New module : GNOME Power Manager)

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 13/07/2005, at 8:09 AM, Hendrik Brandt wrote:

> 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.

In my language, the social position of the person (which includes  
gender) is essential to determining how to describe them.

Perhaps in gettext we need a "identity" as well as "plurals" field. ;)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhÃm  
Viát hÃa phán mám tá do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN