gnome-doc-utils strings (was Re: New module : GNOME Power Manager)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gmail com>]

On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 00:39 +0200, Hendrik Brandt wrote:
> "%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.

>From the gnome-doc-utils translator documentation:

"Document formatting varies greatly across the world. Each locale has a
long history of formatting conventions and methods. The maintainers of
these stylesheets do not know all the nuances of formatting documents
in all locales. The only way we can create better output for your locale
is if you tell us when you encounter problems."

Please, please, please, when you encounter stuff like this, tell me.
Send a big email explaining the problem, and how you'd like to be able
to format this stuff in your language.  But send it to a mailing list
like gnome-doc-devel-list or gnome-i18n; my Inbox is a black hole.

We don't use gettext.  You can't really get to it from XSLT.  We have
a custom localization system that's pretty flexible.  We can solve
these problems in gnome-doc-utils, but we have to know about them.
Arguably, I should have seen this one, since I do speak German, and
my German girlfriend is sitting about two meters away, but still.


So we have a set of related strings that are all used as headers
in the titlepage before a list (possibly singleton) of entities,
which may have genders, or as Clytie pointed out, social positions
which affect how you refer to them.  We can solve this with roles,
if we can somehow find out the relevant information from the source
DocBook files.

What I need from the translators is what sort of conditions would
affect how these things are rendered in their languages.  Also,
what are we expected to do with mixed-gender (mixed-social status,
etc.) lists?

Hendrik, correct me if I'm wrong.  For male authors, you need
"Autor" and "Autoren"; for female authors, you need "Autorin"
and "Autorinnen"; and for a mixed-gender list, you'd use that
crazy construction "AutorInnen"?  (Seriously, it's crazy.)

If we just had to worry about masculine/feminine/mixed, this
would be an easily solvable problem.  But this Vietnamese
social status stuff could make things interesting.  But hey,
interesting problems are fun problems.

--
Shaun