Re: Plurals: a note about writing docs and their translations

[John Mandereau]

Le mardi 04 septembre 2007 à 16:14 +0200, Francisco Vila a écrit :
> This style of writing poses a problem to translators:
> 
> -To create @rglos{dotted notes}, add a dot @samp{.} to the duration number.
> +To create @rglos{dotted note}s, add a dot @samp{.} to the duration number.
> 
> because not always the plural of an enclosed string can be formed just
> adding an 's' to the end of that enclosed string.
> 
> The different order of noun and adjective (in some languages other
> than English) does the plural not to go at the end anymore, and the
> plural cannot 
> be insertad in the middle, either, because of the markup.

The only simple solution I can think of is to rephrase the sentence so
you can use the marked up word or phrase in singular.  In French, we can
easily say (English litteral translation):

"To create a @rglos{dotted note}, add..."


> So in cases like this I have to delete any markups and leave it as
> plain text.

This is very important to keep links to the glossary and the program
reference, so please keep at least the link in another part of the
sentence, whether you say it in English or in Spanish.  It looks good in
your last patch to the tutorial.


> Another similar and more general problem is to translate phrases where
> a word is marked up (eg engravers, contexts and so on), these long,
> compound words with the main noun at the end may look OK when read in
> English, but the translation needs to clarify every time (I think)
> what are we talking about.

This problem arises because the docs refer to names used in the input
language, which are in English, and these names cannot translated.
That's why some clarifications are often (maybe not always) necessary in
the translations, so what you've done in your last patches looks right;
we often do the same in the French translation.

Cheers,
John