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

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hmm, big CC list :-)
Can we assume that everyone involved in i18n/l10n for freeciv
is on freeciv-dev, or should we make another mailing list
(eg, freeciv-nls?) for this sort of traffic? 

Jeff Mallatt wrote:
> At 1999/10/09 22:06 , David Pfitzner wrote:

> 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).

A simple fix to the "the" problem, although perhaps slightly less 
general/pleasant than your suggestion, would be to add "The" into 
all wonder names where appropriate, and leave it out of the message 
string.  

So Apollo Program would always be listed as "The Apollo Program".  
Which kind of makes sense, except it would occur for a _lot_ of 
the wonders (almost all except those which are Someone's Something).
... so maybe as you suggest, to avoid too many "The"'s, and also
to deal with "an".

Another issue previously raised is that "building" in the above
phrases is not apporpiate to all wonders; eg, 

  The Romans have started...
     "building the Pyramids"
     "creating A.Smith's Trading Co."
     "developing a Cure For Cancer"
     "undertaking Darwin's Voyage"
     "forming the United Nations"
     "establishing Women's Suffrage"

Well, maybe some of these could be improved, but you get the idea.

> 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.

Seems good to me.

> 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 ;-) 

Well, the "'s" is part of the string which is translated, so
as long as the translator can find some generic form, its ok.
(It seems to me once you get to this stage, a more pressing
problem is going to be word order, for messages where multiple
components are assembled.  (The gettext docs had something about
this, but I didn't understand it, or at least didn't understand
how it could work, in general.))

>  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 

Yeah, seems very ugly to me, and would never generalize to
separate client/server languages.

One change which would make this problem easier would be to use 
nation names instead of leader names in such cases.  Eg, 
"a Greek Chariot" instead of "Alexander's Chariot".  Actually,
I would prefer this in general, especially with the (good!) 
proliferation of leader names -- I sometimes have to go check
which nation a given leader corresponds to for these messages.

Where/how does this happen for city names?  (And can such cases
be expressed differently to avoid this problem?)

-- David