lynx-dev Danish translation of lynx

[Byrial Jensen]

Hello Lynx developers

Morten Bo Johansen and I have begun to translate Lynx to Danish.

I have some questions and comments in that occasion.

1) As far as I can see, there is at most 78 characters in the
translatable lines. Is this a limit which may not be exceeded, or
is there a limit at 79 or 80 characters?

2) Some strings are even filled up with spaces to exactly 78
characters, like this one:

#. #define FORM_NOVICELINE_ONE
#: LYMessages.c:175
msgid ""
"            Enter text into the field by typing on the keyboard     "
msgstr ""

I suppose that the translation must be exactly the same length. Is
this correct?

3) Are there other issues with regards to the length of
translations that we must be aware of?

4) Some places the translatable strings are not whole sentences, but
only single words. This is not good because the order of words vary
from language to language.

For example this code from LYExpandHostForURL() in LYUtils.c isn't
good:

    if (LYCursesON) {
        StrAllocCopy(MsgStr, WWW_FIND_MESSAGE);
        StrAllocCat(MsgStr, host);
        StrAllocCat(MsgStr, FIRST_SEGMENT);
        HTProgress(MsgStr);
    } else if (Startup && !dump_output_immediately) {
        fprintf(stdout, "%s '%s'%s\n", WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, host, FIRST_SEGMENT);
    }

            if (LYCursesON) {
                StrAllocCopy(MsgStr, WWW_FIND_MESSAGE);
                StrAllocCat(MsgStr, host);
                StrAllocCat(MsgStr, GUESSING_SEGMENT);
                HTProgress(MsgStr);
            } else if (Startup && !dump_output_immediately) {
                fprintf(stdout, "%s '%s'%s\n", WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, host, GUESSING$
            }

"Looking up 'some.host'" is in Danish:
"Slår 'some.host' op".

"Looking up 'some.host' first" is
"Slår først 'some.host' op".

"Looking up 'some.host.net', guessing..." is
"Slår 'some.host.net' op, gætter...".

So you see that it is impossible or hard to make good translations
of WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, FIRST_SEGMENT and GUESSING_SEGMENT.

Another function which handle single words in a way which is hard to
translate is LYoptions() in LYOptions.c.

Best Regards,

-- 
Byrial
http://www.image.dk/~byrial/

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