On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 12:58:46AM +0200, Christian Neumair wrote: > Feel free to skim over this message, but just want to know where you can > help as a translator with a non-english mother tongue. Your feedback is > important for solving the Nautilus translation bug 551222 [1]. > > 1. Where YOU can help us > ======================== > > In your mother tongue, in the sentence > > “3 hours, 2 minutes remain(s)” > > do you decide which verb form (i.e. plural form) to use for “remain” > based on > > A. the SUM of hours and minutes > B. ONLY the hours > C. ONLY the minutes? > > In English, Spanish, Italian and German we just A., i.e. the sum. > > However, these languages are special in that we just have two plural > forms N=1, N!=1, so in this case the plural would always be used. > > On the other there are very complex plural forms in some languages (for > instance in Russian).
In Slovak language we have different order of words in the translated string: zostávajú 3 hodiny a 2 minúty (remain 3 hours and 2 minutes) and we are counting only hours (or minutes where there are no hours at all; whatever is first in this example) to determine whether singular or plural form of "remain(s)" is used. Examples: zostáva 1 hodina a 2 minúty (singular form of "remain(s)") zostávajú 2 hodiny a 1 minúta (plural) zostáva 1 minúta (singular) zostávajú 2 minúty (plural) zostáva 1 hodina (singular) zostávajú 2 hodiny (plural) The important thing is that we have 3 plural forms: 1 - singular 2 to 4 - plural, form 1 other - plural, form 2 Example: 1 minúta 2 minúty 5 minút BUT, when translating "remain(s)" for these 3 plural forms we are using only two forms of translated "remain(s)": zostáva 1 minúta (remains - singular; minute - singular) zostávajú 2 minúty (remains - plural; minute - plural, form 1) zostáva 5 minút (remains - singular; minute - plural, form 2) There is no third form for "remain(s)" in Slovak. Or we could say that translated "remain(s)" have plural form 2 and singular form just equal. My 2 eurocents. -- +-------------------------------------------+ | Marcel Telka e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | homepage: http://telka.sk/ | | jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +-------------------------------------------+ _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list gnome-i18n@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
