[freeciv-i18n] Re: Grammatical cases in translations.

[Christian Knoke <chrisk@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 04:28:58PM +0100, Gregory Berkolaiko wrote:
> I have been playing civ3 and freeciv-on-win in Russian for some time and I 
> was wondering, is it possible to get the cases right in the translated 
> strings, where a string substitution occurs.
> 
> Here is an example:
> 
> string "We gave %s the city of %s", where the first %s is the name of the 
> nation and the second is the name of the city.  The name of the nation 
> should be in dative case and the city name is in accusative.
> 
> With very few exceptions these cases are indistinguishable in English.  
> However I know that there are 4 in German, 6 in Russian and about 14 in
> Finnish/Estonian/Udmurt.  The above cases are present in all of them.
> 
> How are such things handled?

Badly.

In german, we try to change the word order, to avoid unpleasent cases.
This results in often unsatisfactory texts, and sometimes even this is
impossible.

I would die for better gettext support in this respect, but have no idea how
this might be possible.

Christian

-- 
Christian Knoke          * * *          http://www.cknoke.de
* * * * * * * * *  Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse dividendum.