From kde-i18n-de  Tue Dec 16 00:23:45 2003
From: Malte Starostik <malte () kde ! org>
Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2003 00:23:45 +0000
To: kde-i18n-de
Subject: Re: [Kopete-devel] Wrong use of plural form in kopete?
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-de&m=107153426302665

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On Tuesday 16 December 2003 00:30, Jason Keirstead wrote:
> On December 15, 2003 07:22 pm, Malte Starostik wrote:
> > Now, assuming the use of this i18n() variant as pasted above is okay and
> > only  the translation is wrong, it's still suboptimal when there is more
> > than one person typing (how to trigger this so I can check?): IMHO it
> > doesn't look exactly pretty to write "alice, bob are typing a message".
> > Shouldn't that be "alice and bob are typing a message" and "alice, bob,
> > and fred are typing a message" instead? Or is that Germish? Do we need a
> > new i18n() variant for enumerations? :-)
>
> Without commenting on the rest of the email, the reason you have to say
> "alice, bob" are typing a message is that this can be *any* number of
> people, not just 2 or 3. While you could, in theory, put "alice and bob and
> usera and userb are typing a message", it adds a lot of needless text in
> there. Plus I am not sure how that would be translated properly.
Sure, that's why a simple QStringList::join() doesn't work here. See the 2nd 
example that includes fred above: items are separated by a comma except for 
the last two items that also get an "and".

Now even this simple example shows a subtle problem:
AFAIK in English it's correct to write "Alice, Bob, and me" - I've always seen 
this with a comma preceding the word "and". Is that mandatory or customary?
In German that'd be "Alice, Bob und ich" - there must be no comma preceding 
the word "und" ("and").
I'm pretty sure there's more ways to complicate this in other languages...

Regards,
Malte
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