Re: An i18n problem.

[Bart Schuller <schuller lunatech com>]

On Jan 26, Mark Galassi wrote
>     > Changwoo Ryu <cwryu@adam.kaist.ac.kr> writes:
>     >> All gnome programs use one message catalog.
>     >> 
>     >> But same words can be translated differently.  For instance, I
>     >> can't translate `New' of gtt and `New' of gnomine into a Korean
>     >> word.  (Because it is not good to write an adjective without
>     >> nouns..  I should translate them into `New project' and `New
>     >> game')
> 
> I have not thought about it in depth, but I think we might want to do
> the correct thing in English, and that will translate well.
> 
> In English we should say "New project" and "New game" too!

That might not always apply. The fundamental problem is that there is
one preferred language, which presumably defines the set of meanings to
be translated.

Now what happens when we want to translate our favourite example word
"Free"? Here the authoritative language doesn't differentiate between the
meanings "libre" and "gratis".

Maybe we should treat English as a foreign language too, and use the
longer, disambiguated phrases as the keys in the message catalog.

-- 
Bart Schuller                  schuller+sig@lunatech.com At Lunalabs, where the
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