Re: Formatting lists of things

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2007-06-22 at 10:23 -0500, Shaun McCance 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).

So thus far, I've basically gotten responses about
whether particular languages use the serial comma.
While interesting, the presence or absence of the
serial comma wouldn't affect how I do translations.

With the above proposal, translators would get these
in their PO files:

msgid ", "
msgid " and "
msgid ", and "

The Spanish translators (Jorge said no serial comma
in Spanish) would translate each of these as follows:

msgstr ", "
msgstr " y "
msgstr " y "

So with this scheme, whether or not there's a serial
comma is easily specified by the translator.  I don't
need to worry about it as a developer.

What I'm interested in is if there are languages for
which this will not work.  Possible issues:

1) This provides a way to format a list of two things
   and a way to format a list of three or more things.
   If your language has different ways of formatting,
   e.g., three things and four or more things, this
   won't work.

2) Formatting three or more things is done by putting
   one separator between all but the last pair, and
   another separator between the last pair.  If your
   language uses a different separator between the
   first pair, this won't work.

I suspect the European languages won't present any
difficulties here.  I'm very interested in hearing
from translators of less-like-English languages.

--
Shaun