Hi,
Ok, this time I'm sending a verbose reply unedited. X-) Summary:
Finnish prefers:
#1 the option to choose which of the two forms
(adjectival/nation-plural) to use in the translation (since it might
be best for others as well).
#2 adjectival form over nation-plural (and leader names), if #1 is not
doable.
and
#1 not having to worry about sentence capitalization, or sentence length
*at all* (solve it with code, that's something code can handle! ;)),
or
#2 TRANS comments for strings where sentence length has to be limited to
a specific char count (and minimal assumptions of translated strings
to be already capitalized in general, or word order staying the same
as in the msgid).
A general note:
* When forming msgids, the MAIN and almost only limiter is what
%ses are used in them. The rest of the words matter very little; the
translation will not be literal in most cases anyway. Use the rest of
the msgid to convey the right feeling to the translator, and TRANS
comments when that's not enough.
On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 06:40 -0500, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> Joan Creus wrote:
> > 2008/1/26, William Allen Simpson:
> > Would the latter be better as?
> >
> > + /* TRANS: <leader> ... the Poles. */
> > + _("%s is the rebellious leader of the %s."),
> >
> > Assuming nation adjectives remain singular, yes, the second one is
> > better, since nouns do have plural.
> I think that Sini likes this better, too, although he was not clear.
Hehe, sorry, I did an essay on how the strings presented in the start of
this thread would get translated, but since I didn't have the energy to
figure out what they were being changed from for a comparative study, I
cut it off as potentially useless when I rewrote the reply to be less
verbose. X-)
Given the option between "Polish" and "Poles", I generally almost always
prefer Polish for one reason: it doesn't have different forms (I'll call
them inflections, I have no idea what the right word is).
The plural will have to be inflected whenever it's not the subject, or
active actor, of the sentence. And I can't inflect %ses. In fact, "of
the Poles" is the exact translation I use for the *adjectival* form, and
when translated like that, the sort-of-adjectival form fits almost
everywhere for Finnish.
The Finnish translation of the above string would have to be kludged so
that both %ses are subjects of their respective sentences, e.g. to:
"%s rises to power; the rebellious %$2s celebrate."
"Matti nousee valtaan; kapinalliset puolalaiset juhlivat."
On the other hand, "Matti is the leader of the Polish rebels." can be
translated literally to Finnish, since 'rebels' is the word that
inflects, while the "Polish" part stays the same (because it's
stubbornly translated to plural-genetive, "puolalaisten").
Marko's idea of giving us the option to choose between the two strings
freely sounds awesome. Is it doable?
> The Leaders are untranslated and always capitalized, so having that at the
> beginning should still be OK (unchanged).
Note that having something in the start of a sentence in English doesn't
guarantee that it'll stay there for another language; there's no point
in spraining your brain trying to come up with an English msgid of a
specific sentence structure to help translators; the only thing that
really matters to us is what %ses you decide to use, not where they are.
That's the real limiting factor.
Or well, at least I am quite used to taking considerable liberties in
the actual translation, since as said, all sentences containing leader
names, unit names, city names, city improvements, nationality plurals or
terrain names will have to be reworked to have every single %s appear as
a subject of a sentence, or stuffed into "parenthesis", when all else
fails.
Parenthesing moves the %s into a role in the sentence where it is so
disconnected it might as well be in parenthesis. Like "to your unit
Archers" - yksiköllesi jousiampujat - instead of "to your Archers" -
jousiampujillesi, which is an impossible inflection. Similarly:
kaupunkiin Helsinki (to the city Helsinki - and the 'of' is not missing
here by accident), rakennushanketta Temppeli ([building] city
improvement Temple), etc. We have lots and lots of Finnish strings of
this form. My eyes would bleed if I were an active Freeciv player, but
you can probably hopefully possibly get used to it after a while. ;)
> > Likewise, changing the leader name to the nation plural:
> > ...
> > Yes, fine.
> >
> The Cities are untranslated and always capitalized, so having that at the
> beginning should still be OK (unchanged).
>
> The trailing nation_plural allows the capitalization to be removed for
> Finnish, and makes no difference for German.
Hm, note that any trailing nation_plural of a msgid will typically end
up as the leading nation_plural in the Finnish translation due to the
compulsory subject kludge; if there's multiple sentences in one message,
I am able to join them with something else than a period though, so that
the nation_plural is in the start of a "clause" (what do you call
independent clauses) instead of a full sentence.
> Telegraphic is exactly what we want! This is destined for the "Message"
> box. We have current PRs about the problems with overly long messages
> and scrolling. And eliminating the adjective seems to help Finnish.
Um. Can we please deal with overly long messages sensibly in the GUI as
much as possible, and TRANS-comment *all* strings which are limited in
space? Finnish translations are a lot longer than the average English
msgid, and working around things extends them even more. Telegraphic
doesn't necessarily mean translateable to telegraphic. :)
> The main problem is translations that aren't updated. I've done my best to
> keep the parameters in the same order, so that old versions work.
Doesn't any change to the msgid immediately fuzz up the string, so it
won't work in any case? You're not de-fuzzing stuff automatically, are
you?
--Sini
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