Some time ago I sent this message to django-developers and django-i18n, it
never appear on django-i18n hence I forwarded to django-developers. As there
seems to be some activity here those days about the Spanish language I
wanted to recall in this issue but Google Groups seems to have
**absolutelly** forgot about this message... try to find it :)
So I'm re-sending.
=================
Hi,
On latin languages, at least, there are two ways to refer to the other
part of a conversation, or a reader.
You can refer to them as "You" ("tú", "tu") or you could refer to them
with another pronoun which has a special name I can't remember, those
have no translation to English but, for "You" they would be "Usted",
"Vosté" in Spanish and Catalan which is the "more polite" way, and the
common in proffessional sites and documents.
When translating a text from English to a latin language (Spanish and
Catalan for example) you have to decide whether to translate using the
first or second form. On a random text this poses no problem, but if
you're translating something like the stock django .po files there's an
issue...
The second form is what could be called "the impersonal one" and is the
one that a bussiness looking at django will like on the translation as
their site will be written using that same formula the translation
would make sense with the content of the site. ie. the Catalan
translation is submitted this way. But then, if you are building a
personal site you'll most likely use the first form (that has a verb:
"tutear") but then, if the translation uses the second one the text
outputted by django will not make sense with your content.
Another issue is that, as there's no doc that says whether things
should be translated one way or the other you can have every language
with one approach or another which isn't nice for multilanguage sites.
So, a few questions arise:
a) On languages that provide those two forms of communication, the
"polite" and the "not so polite" (as explained by the Spanish Academy
Dictionary) which one is to be used on Django translations?
b) What do we do then with the other side of the users? (the one
that will write their content in the other form).
For a) I'd suggest to use the first form, the "polite" as it's the
recommended by Spanish language institutions ( www.rae.es), for b) ...
here comes the issue! my first idea was to simply create a new locale,
i.e. "es-tu" (for 'es-tuteada') which would be the "tuteated" variant
for es-, "ca-tu" and so on. That would be the cleanest way to handle
this but I don't know if it can be done at a programming level.
On the other side, I've never seen a framework telling whether they use
form 1) or 2) [normally the translations use a mix of both, which is
the worst case!] and none provides a way to choose between.
What do you think?
Marc.
PS: Sent to i18n as it, right now, has more to do with i18n that
development itself.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Django I18N" group.
To post to this group, send email to Django-I18N@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/Django-I18N?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
