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GNU gettest manual
From: |
Purodha Blissenbach |
Subject: |
GNU gettest manual |
Date: |
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:06:11 +0100 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.9.9 |
Hi,
I have got a version of the preliminary draft GNU gettext documenation on my
computer with poedit. It says:
Edition 0.10.35, 1 May 1998
That is 10 years old, wouw.
It publishes an outdated e-mai address which should be updated:
<address@hidden>: host mx10.gnu.org[199.232.76.166] said: 550
*.ai.mit.edu no longer in use. use @gnu.org instead. (in reply to RCPT TO
command)
Few remarks:
In "Aspects in Native Language Support" it talks of countries a lot. This is
misguiding, and too imprecise. "Cultures or Regions" would be the better
term. Beware: Many major languages like Chinese, English, Spanish,
Arabic,Bengali, Portuguese, Swahili German, Kurdi, Azeri, Dutch are spoken in
several or even many countries and continents. Some languages are spoken only
in federal states, provinces, regions, vallies, islands, cities, or even
villages inside a country. Many countries have many languages, such as India
(260+), Philipines (~80), South Africa, and so on. Some areas are having
mixed languages, for instance East Belgium has French, Wallon, German, and
vernacular, and very many people are fluent using either. While i18n may use
an open set lof languages, L18n has a complicated set of mixes and
dependencies on language, culture, and the like.
One thing hardly taken care of is that peoples multilinguality varies.
Setting a computer to use, say, russian, is by far insufficient. In fact, one
would need to tell on a per user basis, which language / locale to use, and a
series of fallbacks, to be used in such cases, where all more perferred L18ns
are unavaliable, This thinking needs to be reflected in each program, or at
least the libraries it is using. All GUI program should allow interactive and
instant switching between languages and locales, so as to aid people who are
not sure to have understood something right in one language or with one
locale, and to support changing users at the screen without having to reboot.
It is fairly insufficient, only to translate strings. Parameter insertion is
needed, parameter typing is needed, case switching is needed (for instance on
various grammatical forms, numbers, genders, addressing modes and
politeness, to name only a few) and programs, programmers, screen designers
and layouters need to be aware of the flexibility required by the outcomes.
Hints:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/I18n
http://cldr.unicode.org/
Greetings - Purodha Blissenbach, <address@hidden>
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