From kde-i18n-doc  Tue Mar 18 15:47:15 2003
From: Jacek Stolarczyk <jacek () mer ! chemia ! polsl ! gliwice ! pl>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 15:47:15 +0000
To: kde-i18n-doc
Subject: Context information in date
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=104800488722422

Hi,

In certain languages (Polish, other Slavic and I believe in many more) it
is currently impossible to properly form a phrase containing date, e.g.:
"On Wednesday 19 March 2003 Joe User wrote:"
In Polish the date appearing separately would be:
"Sroda, 19 marca 2003", but the translation of the phrase above would be:
"W srode, 19 marca 2003" (I have omitted the diacritics for nasal "e" in
"srode", "w" corresponds to english "on"). Similar problems occur for
other phrases like "from Tuesday to Saturday" where also nominative forms
of weekday names are not used. Morover they are different than the forms
in "On Tuesday...".

Conclusion:
The KLocale functions returning full forms of words (like date in long
format) should take into consideration context information. These
functions are used to return "variables" in many programs (KOffice, KMail)
which sometimes produce wrong results without context info.

We have a small seed
in KLocale, the configuration option specified in the language file called
NounDeclension. We need to further extent it, so that it is used in dates
or weekday names.

I volunteer to write it, but I need to know how the situation looks in
other languages that may be interested. From what I gather, in Polish we
need three contexts for dates:
1) empty (date written separately)
2) "On ..."
3) "From ...", "to ..." (both use tha same case)
I imagine it may look different in other languages. We need to make a
generic solution. Please also note, that the problem above is different
from the problem of proper case of month name, which is already solved.
There the context is provided by the date itself, so the problem may
solved internally.

Please write follow-ups to kde-i18n-doc, this message is crossposted also
to kde-core-devel and kmail.

Regards,

Jacek Stolarczyk
--
jstolarz@kde.org
Polish KDE translation team.