It would be better if you explicitly mention here the strings you refer to and what would your new string suggestion (that would be i18n-friendly).

In general, if a string is not l10n-friendly even for one single language, it is wrong and it should be fixed.

The string is "_Switch image after:" and the other string is "seconds", so in oder for it to make sence in my language it must be joined to say " _Switch image after seconds which are:" 

I know it does not sound good in English but it makes perfect sence in Zulu.

I hope I explained it well.

Well, to fix this we need a single string that carries the same meaning.

At the moment though I can't think of a good one.

I have looked but I also can't find any sentence that has the same meaning. Is that the only way we can fix this then?

So there is no way, to have "Switch image after %d seconds", the "%d" being replaced by the GtkSpinButton?

Otherwise, may "Seconds before switching images:" be ok?

I really don't like the inlining of an input widget, but I see that it's basically what we are doing at the moment (if you remove the colon from the first string it basically looks like that).

Also I'm starting to think that allowing the user to explicitly set the amount of seconds is a bit weird. Maybe we just need to simplify this with a slidebar ("Slideshow speed:") and a few predefined possibilities "Fast/Medium/Slow".

No placing seconds first wont work.

Luis I think "Switch image after %d seconds" could work, I would still have to translate it and put %d at the end of the sentence, but I think that is fine because I have translated similar strings. In this case will the user not have the option to choose the seconds himself?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Also I'm starting to think that allowing the user to explicitly set the amount
> of seconds is a bit weird. Maybe we just need to simplify this with a slidebar
> ("Slideshow speed:") and a few predefined possibilities "Fast/Medium/Slow".

We shouldn't do that. People seem to be pretty sensible about this setting.

(In reply to comment #5)
> So there is no way, to have "Switch image after %d seconds", the "%d" being
> replaced by the GtkSpinButton?

It's not really nice to handle on the programming side. For example we wouldn't be able to use GtkBuilder there. We then would have to split the string on the "%d" and separate the text onto two labels which doesn't sound very safe to me at first.

@Priscilla:
How do you normally handle units in translated strings? What does your language do different there compared to others? It's hard to believe that something like that didn't occur earlier. Maybe there are already working solutions in the field.

@Felix 
In most of the applications and websites translated into Zulu, some of the texts does not read well because programers refuse to accomodate the language, most translators leave it as that and the believe that the people reding that will inderstand what to do but the sentence itself is not correct. I thought by skipping the "seconds" string and not translating it, and then just puting the translation on the longer string I would solve all of this. But I gues I was mistaken because someone told me that we should change the string.

Zulu is a strange language and most of the time you cannot just add anything infront of a sentence, if you change a word in a sentence the whole sentence must change too, that is why we had a problem before about numbers because if you deal with place holders you just don't know what number is going to be the and you know that the sentence changes when the number changes. 


I hope I explained it right so that you can understand :)

(In reply to comment #10)
> @Felix 
> In most of the applications and websites translated into Zulu, some of the
> texts does not read well because programers refuse to accomodate the language,
> most translators leave it as that and the believe that the people reding that
> will inderstand what to do but the sentence itself is not correct. I thought by
> skipping the "seconds" string and not translating it, and then just puting the
> translation on the longer string I would solve all of this. But I gues I was
> mistaken because someone told me that we should change the string.

Sure, changing the string is in most cases the "right thing".
In this case though, assuming we chose Luis' first proposal, the end-result in terms of widgets would not be different to the current state.
So theoretically this could be solved by adding a translation context together with a explaining translators comment. That wouldn't be very clean, but is IMHO cleaner splitting the string programmatically on runtime.


> Zulu is a strange language and most of the time you cannot just add anything
> infront of a sentence, if you change a word in a sentence the whole sentence
> must change too, that is why we had a problem before about numbers because if
> you deal with place holders you just don't know what number is going to be the
> and you know that the sentence changes when the number changes. 
> 
> 
> I hope I explained it right so that you can understand :)

I'm trying. :)

Hmm, so how do you build numbers with units in Zulu, for example in datasheets ( e.g. 230 Volts)? This question is interesting as in theory said option could be extended with a second selection:

Time until switching to next image: [123] [Seconds/Minutes/Hours]

Well in the case of datasheets the the translation would be "amavolti angu-230), the number is always at the end,

I see what you mean but this:
 "Time until switching to next image: [123] [Seconds/Minutes/Hours]"

we have to translate as

"Isikhathi okumele ushintshele kwisithombe esilandelayo: [Imizuzwana/Imizuzu/Amahora] angu-[123]

The number is always at the end, but this reads totally well.

Okay then, my proposed "solution" for this would be to add context markers (e.g. "PrefsDialog") and translator comments to the two affected labels. This would allow Priscilla to leave the translation for "seconds" empty without affecting possible other uses of "seconds" in the UI, while other translations just have to update the context.

Any objections from I18N?

This probably still needs plural handling, since the form of the noun can vary with the numerical value, as well certain agreement aspects in the rest of the sentence. Please take this up on the i18n mailing list - I'm concerned about languages that have a plural form without the explicit ordinal number mentioned (like Arabic, I think).

Plural handling is not an issue here, as it the number still is separate of the label. If we would change the labels according to the set number this could massively change the dialog's (horizontal) layout in the affected row, which is not a good behaviour in my opinion.

I'll try to cook up a mail to l10n-list.

I think plural handling is definitely an issue here. "Switch image after 1 seconds" is already wrong in English which has very simple plural handling. In other languages I guess it will sound at least this strange, and in some, maybe even more (since more cases will be incorrect, depending on the ordinal number in the spinbox). Most languages vary their noun forms or syntactical agreement for ordinal numbers between 1-20 - just about the realistic range for this spinbox in eog, I guess.

If we want this to be a real sentence with the spinbox acting as a cardinal number, we'll have to connect to events in the spinbox to adapt the rest of the sentence. I agree that changes in the horizontal layout won't be nice. Bad grammar is also not nice.

An entirely different solution (maybe a bit of a cop-out) is to handle the "seconds" as a separate description, and not part of the sentence. What I mean is something like this:

Time between images:    [[ 4]] (seconds)

This way "(seconds)" is not part of a sentence. The left hand sounds arguably a bit more clumsy, and this might not solve it for everybody. A tough one to fix :-)

(In reply to comment #14)
> I'm concerned about
> languages that have a plural form without the explicit ordinal number mentioned
> (like Arabic, I think).
Right. In Arabic, singular and dual are better without an explicit number. I think this cannot reasonably be translated using gettext plural handling.

I think the last proposal is better, but even then, I'd rather translate it as something like:

Time between images (in seconds):     [[4]]

So even with this solution, one may want to split the sentence differently. So maybe Felix' "solution" is the best we can get.

(In reply to comment #16)
> is something like this:
> 
> Time between images:    [[ 4]] (seconds)
> 
> This way "(seconds)" is not part of a sentence. The left hand sounds arguably a
> bit more clumsy, and this might not solve it for everybody. A tough one to fix
> :-)


I think that Friedel has a point, this might be the solution, in this way seconds does not become part of the sentence and the user will understand what is said, and the whole thing is not neccesarily gramacatically incorrect.

(In reply to comment #17)

> Time between images (in seconds):     [[4]]
> 
> So even with this solution, one may want to split the sentence differently. So
> maybe Felix' "solution" is the best we can get.

Abderrahim Kitouni-- this might be a good way and it will not change anything, it would only mean that the seconds string be removed and only one string should be used. I think we are comming to a solution here.

(In reply to comment #9)

> > Also I'm starting to think that allowing the user to explicitly set the amount
> > of seconds is a bit weird. Maybe we just need to simplify this with a slidebar
> > ("Slideshow speed:") and a few predefined possibilities "Fast/Medium/Slow".
> 
> We shouldn't do that. People seem to be pretty sensible about this setting.

Regardless of the fix for the translatable string, I do think that this setting doesn't need to be in the Preferences. A "faster/slower" widget in the slideshow (fullscreen) toolbar/context menu that would simply remember its last state is a much cleaner solution, IMHO.

So we have a few ideas here. Any developer who is able to look into this? It would be really great if we could have this fixed before the string freeze in a few days.

But we are already in UI freeze, so I am not sure we can sneak this in.

Also I still believe that a fix for this should simplify the settings to have only a fast/medium/slow setting (probably even shown during the fullscreen as Reinout points out). Hardcore users could eventually tweek the values for fast/medium/slow from dconf.

A compromise is to have a horizontal scale that allows to select values, say, between 1 and 60 secs. The label at the scale would switch from "1 second" to "n seconds" (n > 1) on user interaction.

If it goes the way of the horizontal scale with the label as you describe, please ensure to use proper plurals, and not just something like n > 1 :-)
https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines/Plurals

Yes, of course! :) Sorry for the english-only explanation.

We can probably use my approach from comment 13 (adding contexts) for this release. That wouldn't be affected by the UI freeze and would avoid ambiguity for translators.

For the next series we could try if the scalebar approach can make things nicer.

Thanks Felix. This sounds like the best for this release. Priscilla, this way you will have to review the string next week when the English is in string freeze, but it will allow you to do the trick that you had in mind. If we don't update the release, the English "seconds" will show in Zulu :-)

Context and comments are in:

commit 781e314d5af64fb94c3b5da8c99a8215b10e72dc
Author: Felix Riemann <>
Date:   Sat Sep 3 17:28:10 2011 +0200

    Add translator context and comment to a split sentence
    
    The sentence has a GtkSpinButton injected in the middle making it
    difficult to translate for some languages, as one part of the label
    could end up empty. This adds translation contexts to the labels to
    avoid possible ambiguities and an expaining comment.
    
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654548

Will send a mail to gnome-i18n-list in a few minutes.

I also opened bug 658127 as a followup to this bug to track the incorporation of the scale widget in the next release period.
---
This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.

JFYI, bug 658127 is now also fixed in master.

The spinbutton has been replaced by a scale / slider and the description string has become "Time between images:".