Re: Issues in translating GNOME to Irish

[Jakub Friedl <jfriedl suse cz>]

Sean Burke píše v Út 13. 03. 2007 v 23:40 -0600:
>     I'm working on updating the Irish translation of GNOME and I've run 
> into a couple of problems. First is the use of a generic "About" string 
> to set about window titles. I've been working on gnome-panel, where the 
> program name to translate is "The GNOME Panel". This translates to "An 
> Painéal GNOME", which creates problems with the translation of "About" 
> to "Eolas faoi". When "faoi" is placed before the definite article "an", 
> the article is dropped and "faoi" becomes "faoin". Additionally, the 
> word "Painéal" needs to be mutated (becoming "bPainéal") because it 
> follows this. Dropping the "An" would require "Painéal" to become 
> "Phainéal" in this context. I figure with as diverse a language 
> community as GNOME seems to have, one of the other translators might 
> have run into this issue as well and know of a solution. I would 
> appreciate any help I can get on this issue.
>     The second problem involves the way that numbering works in Irish. 
> In the singular, a noun will never have a number placed before it. Thus, 
> "You will be automatically logged out in %d second" would translate 
> without the %d. This seems like it might cause issues, though I'm not 
> sure. Any feedback on this? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Sean Burke

I am afraid that the only solution in such cases is to fill a bug
against the software (in GNOME bugzilla) to avoid constructing strings
from smaller parts in such cases. I have similar problems in similar
situations in Czech language.

Jakub Friedl