[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Improved grammatic handling of nation names.

[Gerhard Killesreiter <killesreiter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Jeff Mallatt <jjm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


> Something like this could be made to work (it may be lots of work,
> however ;).

Considering what you wrote below I consider it wortwhile for the game.
OTOH I am less likely to contribute due to limited knowledge.

> Two dimensions might be a problem, in general. The ruleset files

I was thinking of singular/plural.

> might contain a single "namelist", that would be translated, e.g.:

>   name="German" namelist=_("German|Germans|Germans'|A German|a
> German\ |A German's|a German's|The German|the German\ |The
> German's|the German's|The Germans|the Germans\ |The Germans'|the
> Germans'")

The length of the list does not really matter as long as the list
follows some consistent scheme. Translators could print it out and
stick it on the monitor :-) 
Maybe we could work around the uppercase/lowercase Problem. (Uppercase
if at the beginning of sentense, lowercase else.) Umm, is this valid
for all languages?

It would be usefull to add a fallback routine that uses entry #1 if
the intended one is not available.

> And, the code would look something like:

>   i18nsprintf(buffer, _("%a[11] did something to %a[12]."),
> get_nation_namelist(attacker->nation),
> get_nation_namelist(defender->nation));

Very nice. And not longer than now.

> Since the translators would have control of both parts (the name
> list and the format string), this would be most general -- a
> translator could even add cases that exist only in their language.

Yep.

> On the down side, this is fairly hard to maintain. The order and
> length of the list must be maintained consistantly across all the
> nations files. 

Yes, but the same applies to everything you want to translate. 

> Futhermore, inserting an element anywhere other than
> at the end would require changing most/all format statements. Also,

Well, then add it at the end :)

The best way[tm] is probably to _first_ think a while about what one
is going to need. Make some (language specific) standard.

> simply using this is prone to errors -- I had to count three times
> to get the indices (11 and 12) correct for my example.

Honestly, I think that translators would love to maintain the
translations this way. After all it is their language. And if they do
a translation they probably want to do it the best way possible.


To achieve this we need to add your approach for:

- nation names
- leader names
- unit names
(- improvement names, I don't think we need it now, but maybe some
modpack would need it.)


Comments?

BTW: Has anybody asked the people from the GNU translation project how 
they handle stuff like this?

Cheers,
        Gerhard