GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 261082
Recurrence messages in evolution calendar causing problems for translation
Last modified: 2006-09-29 08:27:26 UTC
#: calendar/gui/e-itip-control.c:596 #, c-format msgid "Every day" msgid_plural "Every %d days" #: calendar/gui/e-itip-control.c:601 #, c-format msgid "Every week" msgid_plural "Every %d weeks" #: calendar/gui/e-itip-control.c:603 #, c-format msgid "Every week on " msgid_plural "Every %d weeks on " #: calendar/gui/e-itip-control.c:638 #, c-format msgid "every month" msgid_plural "every %d months" #: calendar/gui/e-itip-control.c:642 #, c-format msgid "Every year" msgid_plural "Every %d years" These %d:s cause problems for some languages when it comes to translation. In English, it's possible to both say "every 6th month" and "every 6 months" AFAIK. This is not the case in all languages. In Swedish, only the equivalent of "every 6th month" ("var 6:e månad") is possible to use. Saying something like "var 6 månad" is incomprehendible, and even though you can perhaps figure out what it is supposed to mean, it looks very weird.
Christian, how about strings of the form: "With the period od %d days" "With the period od %d weeks" for plurals? Or at least, can you use a similar string in Swedish? I'm asking because Serbian also uses only one form, but that form is not "every 6th month", but rather "every 6 months". Also, I strongly believe any original strings should avoid things like "3rd", "6th", "21st" etc. ("ordered numbers", or whatever they're called in English), because they may need different algorithms for each language (for Serbian it's simple since we simply use "3.", "6." and "21." -- append a period, but other languages may be more complicated such as English).
Yes, "...with a period of %d months" would work. It may look awkward at first but I'm starting to beleive it's the only way to solve this for most languages. Ordinals is a pain.
Marking as easy_fix given the above information.
when anyone's working on this, please also directly solve 61980 which is about nearly the same msgid's!
retargetting the string translation bugs that were targetted to 2.1 to 2.3. for an entire list see bug 236276.
this looks like it needs gettext support. "With the period of x days" is just awful english, and besides if that is what the translation requires, why not just translate it as if it said that? It will still use a %d for the count, so the english version makes no difference.
Michael, such "awful english" would have the advantage of the problem being thought through again and again, and perhaps even better solution could be found which would work for a larger number of languages. Of course, if that doesn't happen, it might be enough to simply provide a translator comment that this string might be translated as "With the period of %d days" if needed for some languages (it's hard for translators to be flexible with not much of a context, and giving specific ideas is always nice).
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
still in current cvs, retargetting to 2.5
Created attachment 73534 [details] [review] Translator comments added for swedish translators.
ushveen: if we'd remove that swedish comment (you're sure that this is *only* the case in swedish, because you know all the other thousand languages of the world?) and that "integer" (what is that? do i need to be a developer to understand this?) comment, i'd be happy with this. /* For Translators: In this can also be translated as "With the period of %d day/days", where %d is a number. The entire sentence is of the form "Recurring: Every %d day/days" */
Created attachment 73610 [details] [review] Resubmitting the patch.
Commited the patch