Re: lynx-dev Danish translation of lynx

[Leonid Pauzner]

6-May-2000 18:22 Byrial Jensen wrote:
> Hello Lynx developers
Hello.

> Morten Bo Johansen and I have begun to translate Lynx to Danish.

> I have some questions and comments in that occasion.

> 1) As far as I can see, there is at most 78 characters in the
> translatable lines. Is this a limit which may not be exceeded, or
> is there a limit at 79 or 80 characters?
perhaps 79 characters is a reasonable limitation.

> 2) Some strings are even filled up with spaces to exactly 78
> characters, like this one:

> #. #define FORM_NOVICELINE_ONE
> #: LYMessages.c:175
> msgid ""
> "            Enter text into the field by typing on the keyboard     "
> msgstr ""

> I suppose that the translation must be exactly the same length. Is
> this correct?

Hmm. Seems these lines vere overlooked by developers
(they affect several messages for NOVICE user mode only,
in particular functions  form_noviceline() in LYMainLoop.c;
novice_lines() and noviceline() in LYUtils.c).
This part of code was not revised for a long time,
we should look into it to change other things also.
Thank you.
In the mean time someone else on the list will give you an idea
on this particular case.

> 3) Are there other issues with regards to the length of
> translations that we must be aware of?

> 4) Some places the translatable strings are not whole sentences, but
> only single words. This is not good because the order of words vary
> from language to language.

Yes, this was a bad practice...
We will propably change this in the next release
but please find a workaround yourself for the current release,
perhaps using an empty string (=space) for FIRST_SEGMENT and
GUESSING_SEGMENT will be a reasonable approximation.

> For example this code from LYExpandHostForURL() in LYUtils.c isn't
> good:

>     if (LYCursesON) {
>         StrAllocCopy(MsgStr, WWW_FIND_MESSAGE);
>         StrAllocCat(MsgStr, host);
>         StrAllocCat(MsgStr, FIRST_SEGMENT);
>         HTProgress(MsgStr);
>     } else if (Startup && !dump_output_immediately) {
>         fprintf(stdout, "%s '%s'%s\n", WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, host, FIRST_SEGMENT);
>     }

>             if (LYCursesON) {
>                 StrAllocCopy(MsgStr, WWW_FIND_MESSAGE);
>                 StrAllocCat(MsgStr, host);
>                 StrAllocCat(MsgStr, GUESSING_SEGMENT);
>                 HTProgress(MsgStr);
>             } else if (Startup && !dump_output_immediately) {
>                 fprintf(stdout, "%s '%s'%s\n", WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, host, 
> GUESSING$
>           }

> "Looking up 'some.host'" is in Danish:
> "Slхr 'some.host' op".

> "Looking up 'some.host' first" is
> "Slхr f°rst 'some.host' op".

> "Looking up 'some.host.net', guessing..." is
> "Slхr 'some.host.net' op, gцtter...".

> So you see that it is impossible or hard to make good translations
> of WWW_FIND_MESSAGE, FIRST_SEGMENT and GUESSING_SEGMENT.

> Another function which handle single words in a way which is hard to
> translate is LYoptions() in LYOptions.c.

> Best Regards,

> --
> Byrial
> http://www.image.dk/~byrial/

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