#11688: verbose_name should allow dynamical translation based on a number
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Reporter: mitar | Owner: nobody
Type: New feature | Status: reopened
Component: Internationalization | Version: 1.1
Severity: Normal | Resolution:
Keywords: | Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: 1 | Needs documentation: 0
Needs tests: 0 | Patch needs improvement: 1
Easy pickings: 0 | UI/UX: 0
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Comment (by lukeplant):
This suggestion really isn't going to fix it even for Indo-European
languages, and I think your claim that it does is based entirely on
wishful thinking. You haven't shown any stats, just "I believe". (I'm not
blaming you for this - we've already got at least 70 languages in Django,
and researching all this correctly would be a huge job).
For example, take the phrase "Delete selected %(verbose_name_plural)s". In
French, adjectives must agree with the noun, so the translation of the
word "selected" needs to agree with the gender of whatever word gets
inserted into the phrase.
The current Django translation is: "Supprimer les %(verbose_name_plural)s
sélectionnés". For all feminine model names, this is incorrect - it should
be: "Supprimer les %(verbose_name_plural)s sélectionnées" (extra e). In
other places the current French translations have workarounds like
"%(object)s supprimé(e)s", where "supprimé(e)s" is a bit like doing
"book(s)".
Your proposed solution doesn't accommodate this problem, and it is a very
basic requirement in many European languages, and probably many others.
We are currently at a 95% solution:
* Most sentences/phrases don't need substitutions
* We can cover noun/number agreement using ngettext(). **The original
ticket was about fixing an instance where we are not doing that, and we
should definitely try to fix that case.**
I agree it would be nice to fix the remaining 5%. But we're not going to
agree to a solution that involves a large amount of work, causes a very
significant increase in complexity for developers and actually only fixes
a small (or completely unknown) fraction of the remaining 5%.
A more generic solution might look something like this:
For any translatable string we have:
* A template
* A substitution (let's assume just 1 for now)
Then:
* Any number of properties of the template might cause a different variant
of the substitution to be used (e.g. if the substitution is a noun, the
template sentence might put the noun in the accusative/nominative etc.
position, causing that variant of the noun to be needed)
* Any number of properties of the substitution might cause a different
variant of the template to be used. (e.g. if the substitution is a noun
and has gender, a different sentence is needed that has the right gender
adjective).
(The symmetry between template/substitution and the need for more than one
substitution makes me think this needs to be modelled in a more general
way, but I'll carry on for now).
Now, the properties that cause variants are known to the translators, not
to the template authors. Translators need a way to specify the properties
and the variants, probably with some kind of pattern matching language for
selecting the correct variant.
However:
1. I don't know if my analysis really covers it — I suspect at the very
least that combinatorial explosion of properties/variants could make it
totally impractical.
2. I really think that we should not be inventing solutions here. It is a
general problem, there must be general solutions already invented, and we
should re-use those, or develop them independently of Django.
Finally, we shouldn't derail this ticket with these concerns. Thanks so
much for your work in pushing this ticket forward, but let's have another
ticket to cover issues beyond noun/number agreement.
--
Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/11688#comment:12>
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