[maemo-developers] Maemo localization to officially non-supported languages

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Eero Tamminen <eero.tamminen at nokia.com> writes:
>>> In general, we should try to reduce the need for context and
>>> complicated translations.  The classical example might:
>>>
>>>    Searched in %d files and %d directories.
>>>
>>> You will never be able to translate this nicely for all languages
>>> because of the wierd way they handle plurals, etc, and because of the
>>> combinatorial explosion.
>> Translator can change the order of the arguments with "$".
>> See "man fprintf" and the Single Unix Specification.
> 
> Yep, I know.  Will it be enough?  I found this interesting:
> 
>     http://search.cpan.org/dist/Locale-Maketext/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod#A_Localization_Horror_Story:_It_Could_Happen_To_You

Thanks, I didn't know that about numbers in Arabic and Russian...

Names in Finnish are as bad.  E.g. Gramps Genealogy application has
~3000 translatable strings of which a couple of hundred are of a form:
   %(male)s's %(mother)s living in %(place)s had %(children)d
   children."
Where you replace the string format parameters with names.

...And in Finnish instead of having prepositions, you put them at
the end of the words and depending on what they are and how the name
ends, some of the letters in between change differently.

food -> ruoka
in food -> ruuassa

house -> talo
in house -> talossa

ruler -> viivoitin
in ruler -> viivoittimessa

Basically gettext would need to have language specific parsers[1]
to produce good localizations.


	- Eero

[1] A former collegue of mine had implemented the Finnish language
morphological model in Z-code, but it needed over 64Kb i.e. more
than the old adventure games written in Z-code... :-)