On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko < phco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19.05.2013 13:27, Chusslove Illich wrote: > > >> [: Amir Eldor :] > >> Is gender-aware translations feature for gettext planned or is there > >> anyone working on it? Will it be hard or take a long to implement if I > >> decide to take such a task? > > > > Gender-aware feature could mean various things, so the first task would > be > > to define what it is exactly, which I'm not aware of anyone doing right > now. > > > > On the other hand, some time ago I had made a proposal (on > Translation-i18n) > > for a more substantial set of additions to Gettext, which would handle > > anything for which one can write down an algorithmic solution. This > proposal > > had gender-type examples, too. There was little response, and none from > the > > maintainer, so I took it as a insufficient interest to actually try > > implementing at some point. Maybe it makes sense to resubmit it here now > > (with a bit of dusting off based on additional insights in the meantime). > > I'll do this in another message. > > > > Having algorithmic language in translatations is an overkill in most > cases. You can't expect translators to be skilled coders or to work deep > through the intricacies of program they translate. In particular you > can't expect them to produce good code. Having bugs coming from a > translation to the language maintainer doesn't understand isn't > manageable. Also maintaining the parser is no easy task and would use up > too much time compared to very small benefit. In cases when number of > possible contexts is small and doesn't vary across languages, like > gender-aware translations, dcgettext with providing context is the way > to go. If you have something needing complicated language-depending > processing you should ask yourself whether you're doing something wrong > in the first place and if you could simplify the output, in the same > time making it more comprehensible. Also it has to be considered on > per-case basis. If it's something generic enough to be useful across > applications IMHO it could be considered for inclusion but something > which is too specific to one application it would be maintainance and > bug-hunting nightmare and is probably to be left in the program in > question. > > P.S: I'm not gettext maintainer > > It seems that different languages has more differences than only gender-aware ones. I got several examples from linguistics that I have spoken to. For once, adjectives to objects in Dutch. "They are pretty" is different for men. women, and chairs. There's a project[1] from Wikimedia that tries to solve some of these problems. I haven't had the time to dig much into it but it has this[2] nice example which gettext can't do "out-of-the-box" (or maybe is not intended to?). The project is called jQuery.i18n and is only implemented in jQuery/JavaScript for web applications. [1]: https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n [2]: http://thottingal.in/projects/js/jquery.i18n/demo/
