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Re: Translation Problems (German) [message #3781 is a reply to message #3780]

Sun, 25 June 2006 12:57

mirek
Messages: 13979
Registered: November 2005

Ultimate Member

Werner wrote on Sun, 25 June 2006 05:38

I am adding the German language to a dede2.tr file (LANGUAGE "DE-DE windows-1252") which I will make available to the community (if somebody is interested in Very Happy

).

The peculiarities of the German language lead to problems when parameterized strings are to be translated. For example,

enUS: "Do you really want to delete the selected %s ?"

needs 4 different translations depending on what "%s" means:

1) %s = "Bereich" (area)
deDE: "M�chten Sie wirklich den ausgew�hlten %s l�schen?"

2) %s = "Zeile" (row)
deDE: "M�chten Sie wirklich die ausgew�hlte %s l�schen?"

3) %s = "Objekt" (object)
deDE: "M�chten Sie wirklich das ausgew�hlte %s l�schen?"

4) %s = "Bereiche" (areas), "Zeilen" (rows), "Objekte" (objects)
deDE: "M�chten Sie wirklich die ausgew�hlten %s l�schen?"

Actually, the translation depends on the linguistic gender (masculine/feminine/neuter) and the number of what will be substituted for %s. "Bereich", "Zeile", etc. are just examples.

This brings up the following questions:

Is it possible to create universally usable context-dependent translations? (As far as I understand " t_("XXX\vYYY")" needs to know beforehand what "XXX" means in the individual case.)

Is it ok to add only bilingual translations even though the other entries already contain more languages?

Werner

Interesting trouble... Some things are hard to anticipate before you get thrown them at you Smile

I guess, from what I see, the simple solution seems to be:

enUS: "Do you really want to delete %s ?"

Wink

Of course, maybe the really universal would be:

enUS: "%s"

Mirek

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