For most of the languages I know (Catalan, Spanish, French), an adjective
plural is essential. In fact, for these languages the adjective is the same
as the noun, so the latest changes were not really needed (although I like
the rephrasing, I don't care much about the leader's name, I prefer to know
the nation).
2008/1/25, William Allen Simpson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> I'd like an in-depth discussion here of the current issue at:
> (PR#40032) server/plrhand.c civil war message plural
>
> A fairly drastic shortening of the message (currently missing the plural)
> is
> proposed. But Egor says that it would be better to eliminate the
> adjectival
> form of nations entirely, because of Russian "case" and "gender" issues.
Yes, languages with case (Russian and German) have another level of
complexity, but improving gender handling would be great for a lot of
European languages. Now, this IS a can of worms.
His alternative is nation_plural_adjective(). That would be a lot of work,
> (order n**2), but certainly possible. I'd be more receptive with near
> universal support for the idea by other translators.
I don't think it's O(n**2 ); it's rather O(n*m), where n is the number of
nations and m is the number of translations. For a given translator, it's
just O(n). Well, the number of messages is also part of the product, but
this can be done one at a time.
It's certainly possible to eliminate the adjective in some cases. But that
> makes messages more stilted. OTOH, the messages are already cursory.
>
> For example, "Polish rebels" could replaced with "rebel Poles" (awkward)
> and
> "Insurgent Poles" (done, at the beginning of a sentence).
>
> But as subjects are added, it's not so easy. "The Danish nation
> partitions"
> cannot be replaced with "The Danes partition" because that's semantically
> incorrect.... It really is the nation that splits.
>
> And elsewhere, "the Polish Musketeers" would have to be "the Musketeers of
> Poles" (not good in English)!
Yes, the messages with adjective sound a lot better. But there must be a
plural adjective, for a sentence like "Polish rebels".
However, I think this sentence is not that important. After all, civil wars
are not so frequent during gameplay. The concept of "plural adjective" would
be most useful for "battle" sentences, like "Your Cannon survived the
pathetic attack of the Polish Musketeers".
Now, this is O(whatever), because the number of messages is higher and they
should be split. In many languages, possessives vary with gender and/or
number. Some translators use clever tricks (the French one uses the form of
respect for "your" which doesn't vary with gender) to get around this, but
usually we end up with non-grammatical sentences. In my translation, the Spy
is a guy, Uma Thurman be damned.
Gender is also language-dependent. For soldier units, we may probably assume
that Musketeers will always be masculine and plural, but for Caravans and
Freights, cannons, ships and planes, there are probably variations among
languages. In Catalan, for instance, the Caravan is feminine and the Freight
is masculine, so the messages are wrong half the time.
So, in a perfect world, the previous sentence should be split between
"Your %s survived " (with options to change the different forms of "your"
according to the four possible combinations of gender and number)
and "the pathetic attack of the %s %s", with the adjective in the proper
gender and number. That means that we translators should have some way to
codify each unit's gender and number, so the right adjective may be invoked.
I know, it's a daunting task, and that's why I hadn't brought it up. But
hey, you asked!
Cheers,
Joan
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