Subject: Re: The rest of the irregularities in strings
From: Tim Allen (tim@proximity.com.au)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 22:14:56 CDT
>To Whom it may Concern: German has Liebe Vater und Mutter.
>Dear Mom and Dad: German has Sehr veehrte Damen und Herren.
IMHO these are perfectly OK, since the point of the feature is to allow
insertion of common bits of text; common in the user's language. The way
it's implemented is a bit limited and limiting, but 't'will do for a
start. It'd be pointless for each translator to attempt a literal
translation of each item, since the text as translated may not be in
common use in that country. What the translator has to do instead is pick
some common bits of text (and pick exactly the same number of common bits
of text as the original en_US coder) and put them in. Certainly, if I
translated "Sincerely yours," into Indonesian (yg tulus, loh! :-) ), I
wouldn't be optimistic of that being of any use to anyone.
BTW, this has one obvious flaw as currently implemented: the user may be
typing in a language different to the language of the user interface.
Localisation of this text should depend on the language properties of the
text section, not the language of the UI (wow, great new feature: you can
type a letter in a language you don't know; won't that impress
everyone....) Ideally, it would also be better if we could be more
flexible in determining the number of bits of text since, for example, not
all languages have exactly the same number of common ways of ending a
letter. And, better yet, allow each user to maintain their own repertoire
of useful inclusions.
BTW^2, does "Dear Mom and Dad" _really_ deserve a spot in the menus? I
realise that "American undergraduate university students studying at
campuses remote from their town of origin" is a significant part of the
current userbase (and developer base), but is it such a major target
market that they deserve a whole menu item to themselves? :-)
BTW^3 id_ID update RSN, so if anyone plans another release imminently I'd
really appreciate someone sending me a wake-up call.
Tim
-- ----------------------------------------------- Tim Allen tim@proximity.com.au Proximity Pty Ltd http://www.proximity.com.au/ http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/rita_tim/
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