Translating "yes" and "no" as answers to specific questions

[Thomas Thurman <tthurman gnome org>]

I was working the other day on bug 335763, which allowed zenity yes/no 
dialogues to have arbitrary text on the "yes" and "no" buttons.  It 
occurred to me today that this is actually a more general problem for 
yes/no dialogues in languages where the answers to such questions depend 
on the verb used.  (I know Irish and Welsh have this feature.)

For example, from gossip:

msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
msgstr "A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?"

Creating a dialogue with gtk_message_dialog_new() will give us buttons 
called "Ie" and "Nage", which are generic unfocussed yes/no words.

I am turning over whether gettext might be appropriately extended to 
something like, perhaps

#, yes-no
msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
msgstr "A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?"
msgstr[y] "Oes"
msgstr[n] "Nac oes"

or possibly we might extend gtk so that the message_format string can 
(perhaps if passed a special flag) contain yes/no text for the buttons 
as appropriate, which would require minimal changes anywhere else:

msgid "Do you already have an account set up on a server?"
msgstr ""
"A oes cyfrif ar weinydd Jabber gennych eisoes?%(Oes)yb%(Nac oes)nb"

The second is my preferred option out of the two.  It doesn't look hard 
to implement, either.

Thoughts?  Would this be useful outside the Celtic languages?

peace

T

-- 
Thomas Thurman, tthurman at gnome, http://blogs.gnome.org/tthurman
No problem there -- it already is.