Hey, On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 11:36 +0200, F Wolff wrote: > Why are we translating date formats all over GNOME? I think I just > translated it 3 times in the last few days. Isn't there some standard > functionality that is provided by the locale (LC_TIME), or some basic > underlying GNOME technology? I don't understand why it is required. I'll > be very happy if somebody can shed some light on this for me. In my > language we will probably for ever have lots of untranslated > applications. I don't see any reason why they can't use properly > formatted dates provided by the locale. I'm sure I've seen this work on > some platforms/applications. Guess what, that also came to my mind during this issue :-) As for the technical side, only a few standard locale formats exist. There is for example %c: "The preferred date and time representation for the current locale", %x: "[...] preferred date representation [...]" and %X: "[...] preferred time representation [...]". The problem is, however, that most programs require a much bigger variety, as can be seen in this case. They need e.g. a short date representation, a long date one, a very short date/time one etc. to fit into the UI. The standard formats do not give any promises about the length, whereas the translators can examine every case individually, recognize the varieties of lengths and also test if it still fits. Perhaps it would be possible to introduce some GLib functionality that provides date strings that do have specified lengths? It's not about erasing every single strftime string from translations, but at least lowering the number would be a great help. Having to translate it again every time also introduces possible inconsitencies. Could perhaps some GLib/Gtk+ developer give his/her thoughts on this? Regards, Philipp
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