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Re: [Translation-i18n] xtensa message pluralization
- From: <Paul dot Koning at dell dot com>
- To: <augustine dot sterling at gmail dot com>
- Cc: <bruno at clisp dot org>, <translation-i18n at lists dot sourceforge dot net>, <amodra at gmail dot com>, <binutils at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2017 17:52:59 +0000
- Subject: Re: [Translation-i18n] xtensa message pluralization
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- References: <20171107082716.GY10905@bubble.grove.modra.org> <CAGSvup9PD8-HHADP2=YVMLyK59bkLOr7-QbvhU6CAbziDacLFg@mail.gmail.com> <20171108101629.GB10905@bubble.grove.modra.org> <8121408.RSghLZSf2W@omega> <CAGSvup_QbQ9+=s+76-2aQS1SYbgUfQJ=KJohjbB2h66D6fY_7Q@mail.gmail.com>
> On Nov 8, 2017, at 12:40 PM, augustine.sterling@gmail.com wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:
>> Hi Alan,
>>
>>> A question for the translation project: I'm wondering if
>>> I should allow translators to change sentence construction order with
>>> something like the following patch?
>>
>> The proposed patch violates rule #2 "Entire sentences" from [1].
>> In particular, it separates subject and verb of the same sentence
>> into different format strings. This does not work, because in some
>> languages the verb's form depends on the subject's gender.
>>
>> Therefore it should better not be applied.
>>
>
> I know almost nothing about the mechanics and best-practices of
> translation, but I am very supportive and believe it should be done.
>
> To that extent, I support modifying the grammar of the messages, but
> have no opinion at all about how such modification should look.
The short answer is that it's a whole lot more complicated that you might guess. There is a nice summary in the documentation for the "gettext" project: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html
The reason for the "entire sentences" rule is that a lot of languages adjust word forms in fairly complex ways, depending not just on the number (singular/plural, etc.) but also on other considerations. If you have two sentence fragments, in English you can typically just concatenate them and be ok. In lots of other languages it's not that simple; the correct way to phrase part 2 may depend on what is in part 1. A sentence is a grammatical unit, and can be translated in isolation without running into these issues. But half a sentence cannot, at least not necessarily.
Given the limitations of the gettext machinery, if you want clean translation there are certain message constructs you have to avoid. It appears that messages with more than one to-be-pluralized element are such an example, since there isn't an "nngettext" to give you the correct message for the plural based on more than one value.
paul