Re: Marking numbers for translation.

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Richard Hoelscher wrote:

> Mailing here just to make sure I'm not breaking any i18n taboos... I
> recently patched the gnome-games Tetravex component to use localized
> numbers rather than plain old "0" through "9" on the puzzle pieces. This
> is merely for looks, as can be seen here in this Japanese sample:

Hi Richard,

In the short term, perhaps this is the best solution.  But as for
the long term, we in the Persian team have taken another approach
to localized digits.  Our way, you mark your printf format string
for translation, with a context perhaps, something like

  _("puzzle pieces|%d")

and the translator would translate it to "%Id" if they want
localized digits.  It's up to glibc then to substitute the
correct localized digits, that can be define in the locale
definition.  This way most applications need no change in the
code, only translations, but this approach highly depends on the
libc and locale.


Cheers,
behdad

> http://rahga.com/svg/tetravex_ja.png
>
> I've provided a comment about it, but still, marking single-character
> strings for translation seems worth mentioning here. Please let me know if
> anyone of you see problems with it.
>
> -Richard Hoelscher
> http://rahga.com/svg/

--behdad
http://behdad.org/