Mailing List Archive

localization of response in interactive menus
Hello translators!

I just want to bring up an issue that i have been thinking
about working with the swedish translation of the gnupg.
Some strings in the po-file are of the type "nN" and other
are "quit" and if you look at the source the strings are
obviously used to be matched with user input.

I see a problem with translating this type of message
and that is that you change the behaviour of the
translated program depending on which locale the user chooses.
But on the other hand it is nice to let the user use
a localized option to its input.

The ideal solution to this as I see it is that the english
versions of these 'response'-strings are hardcoded into
the c-source along with the N_()-marked strings that the
translators translates to their native languages. A comment
that gets propagated to the po-files that says somehting
in the lines of 'go ahead and translate this, the original
english commands will still work' would be great also.

just a thought
/d

--
Daniel Resare @ Melody Interactive Solutions
address: Bredgränd 4, Box 2163, SE-103 14 Stockholm
phone: +46 8 454 96 00 cellphone: +46 707 333 914
Re: localization of response in interactive menus [ In reply to ]
Moin,

am / On Wed, 15 Dec 1999 10:12:36 +0100, schrieb Daniel Resare
<noa@melody.se> wrote:

>I see a problem with translating this type of message
>and that is that you change the behaviour of the
>translated program depending on which locale the user chooses.

This is a sensitive area, but it should be no problem with modified user
input. It is an import feature of i18n. We have to handle it careful, of
course.

>But on the other hand it is nice to let the user use
>a localized option to its input.

Not only nice, it is IMHO required.


>The ideal solution to this as I see it is that the english
>versions of these 'response'-strings are hardcoded into
>the c-source along with the N_()-marked strings that the
>translators translates to their native languages.

This work. But maybe there are languages, where "Y" means No or "N" means
Yes. So Werner should mark the hardcoded Y and N with a comment, that
forbids the translation of this strings, but in those languages.

Gruss,
Walter (de)
--
Walter Koch Hochdahl am Neandertal
http://www.hsp.de/~koch/ qrv:db0iz-9
walter@1409.org ham:dg9ep@db0iz
koch@hsp.de
Re: localization of response in interactive menus [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 11:11:34PM +0100
Walter Koch wrote:

> This work. But maybe there are languages, where "Y" means No or "N" means
> Yes. So Werner should mark the hardcoded Y and N with a comment, that
> forbids the translation of this strings, but in those languages.

Is gettext able to distinguish between to version of "yes"? I don't
believe so because the only information used to lookup the translation
is the string itself. A workaround may be to prefix the english only
yes with some string and hardcode the length of this string into the
program.

Frankly, I don't believe that there are languages which do swap the
meaning of Y and N and if they answer strings are tanslated it
shouldn't harm anyway becuase the hardcoded english answers will never
be used.


--
Werner Koch at guug.de www.gnupg.org keyid 621CC013
Re: localization of response in interactive menus [ In reply to ]
Werner Koch wrote:
>
> Frankly, I don't believe that there are languages which do swap the
> meaning of Y and N and if they answer strings are tanslated it
> shouldn't harm anyway becuase the hardcoded english answers will never
> be used.

In Greek, "ne" means "yes".

Just my 0.02 EUR,

Peter

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