Re: Formatting lists of things

["Raphael Higino" <phhigino gmail com>]

Hey, Shaun. Good catch.

First a silly note (and question too): AFAIK in English you'd just use
that last comma for disambiguation purposes, right?

On 6/22/07, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> I've run into a localization issue in formatting DocBook,
> and I need some input from translators to decide how best
> to solve it.  Let's say I have a list of people's names.
> There could be any number of people.  I need to format
> this as inline text.  So in English, I'd do:
>
>   Tom and Dick
>   Tom, Dick, and Harry
>   Tom, Dick, Harry, and Sally
>
> The names, of course, don't get translated, but the
> commas and "and" should be.  So again, this time with
> parentheses around the potentially translatable parts:
>
>   Tom( and ) Dick
>   Tom(, )Dick(, and )Harry
>   Tom(, )Dick(, )Harry(, and )Sally
>
> If every language works exactly like English, then I
> can just mark three strings for translation: ", ",
> " and ", and ", and ".  But my guess is that they
> aren't all like English.
>
> So translators, please let me know hows lists of
> things are formatted in your language, including
> instructions on exceptions (i.e. in English, two
> elements are formatted differently than three or
> more, as above).

In Portuguese (at least here in Brazil) our lists just wouldn't have
that last comma:

Tom and Dick
Tom, Dick and Harry
Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally

--
Raphael Higino