[Freeciv-Dev] ideas for some i18n problems (was: call for updated translations)

[Jeff Mallatt <jjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 1999/10/09 22:06 , David Pfitzner wrote:
>One particular problem is that there is still use of the
>function n_if_vowel() to generate "a" vs "an", but I don't
>know a good way to fix this, and again it probably won't
>be fixed before 1.9.0 is released.

This is only used in server/unitfunc.c to attach an indefinite limiting
article ("a" or "an") to the names of nations and unit types.  I have
noticed, also, a need for a way to specify a limiting article (definite
("the") or indefinite ("a" or "an") or, perhaps, no article) for buildings
and wonders (e.g., in "The Romans have stopped building The Women's
Suffrage", where the "The" is inappropriate, however in "The Romans have
stopped building The Apollo Program", the "The" is appropriate).

Perhaps we could address all these problems by adding a new field to the
buildings, nations and units rulesets.  It could be called 'limited', and
would include the name, appropriately limited.  For nations, units and
non-wonder building, we'd always use an indefinite article.  For wonders,
we'd use either a definite article, or no article.

E.g.:

name = _("Roman")
limited = _("?limited:a Roman")

name = _("American")
limited = _("?limited:an American")

name = _("Settlers")
limited = _("?limited:a Settlers")

name = _("Engineers")
limited = _("?limited:an Engineers")

name = _("Airport")
limited = _("?limited:an Airport")

name = _("Barracks")
limited = _("?limited:a Barracks")

name = _("Apollo Program")
limited = _("?limited:the Apollo Program")

name = _("Women's Suffrage")
limited = _("?limited:Women's Suffrage")

This presents us with a capitalization problem.  If one of the "limited"
strings is used at the beginning of a sentence, we need to capitalize it in
English.  Is this true in general?  I'm hoping capitalization is a more
solvable problem ;-)

If the above will all work, that would leave one major problem that I am
aware of (are there others?).  This is the forming of possessives by
appending "'s".  This is done to form the possessive of leader names and
city names -- and both can be any arbitrary string entered by the user.
Does each language have a standard way to form possessives?  (I doubt it,
but I can hope ;-)  If not, do we provide a way for the user to enter the
possessive form in addition to the name on the Select Nation, New City and
Rename City dialogs?  That's sort of ugly -- besides, we don't currently
translate leader or city names, but to provide language-specific
possessive-form suggestions, we'd need to add them to the rulesets, and
have them all translated.  A big job!

jjm