Re: a little start at improving PSPP translatability

[John Darrington]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 01:28:36PM +0200, unknown-1 wrote:
     
     2009/7/16 John Darrington <address@hidden>:
     > Regarding commit "Avoid translating strings that don't need translation",
     > I think your assertion that "Strings such as "%d" do not need 
translation"
     > is incorrect.
     >
     > This is apparantly important for languages such as Arabic. ?See
     > 
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#index-Arabic-digits-1137
     
     Interesting, never thought about that. But off course %d is not
     meaning full, a translator can't do anything with that without further
     information or (s)he has to look in the code. So I would suggest to
     add some comment for the translator what to do with it.

As I understand things, "%d" gets translated either to "%Id" or is left
as is, for the entire translation.  The translator will know which is
appropriate.
Translators who use emacs po-mode have the ability to effortlessly jump
to the position in the code where the translatable string is defined.
     
     Another point, in Latin text we write from left to right. In Arabic
     from right to left. I have really no idea with happens if you
     translate PSPP in Arabic. Anybody on the list who knows this or can
     test it?

Gtk is supposed to handle right-to-left issues.  However if the programmer
calls some very low level pango functions, then it may have to be handled
explicitly.  There may be one or two such places in the GUI, where RTL 
isn't properly handled.  If anyone using PSPPIRE in a Hebrew or Arabic 
locale finds them, I'll see what I can do to fix them.

Ben's new output branch may have to explicitly deal with RTL - I don't know.

     
     > Also, I believe that the ampersand character doesn't hold the same
     > semantics in every language, so has to be translated too.

     I am not sure if I understand, you mean %d could be different in say
     Cyrillic? Hmmm. Anybody on the list knows?

I was refering to the '&' character.  I don't know that it's universally
understood to mean "and".
     
J'

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