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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: KGeography needs your help
From:       Federico Zenith <zenith () chemeng ! ntnu ! no>
Date:       2005-08-03 8:14:55
Message-ID: 200508031014.59267.zenith () chemeng ! ntnu ! no
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Alle 09:23, mercoledì 03 agosto 2005, Clytie Siddall ha scritto:
> On 03/08/2005, at 4:00 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > As the only languages i speak don't have gender for countries,
> > cities, etc i
> > can not try to find solutions for the gender problem as i can not
> > "reproduce"
> > that problem.

Albert, wait a minute-I thought you spoke Catalan (and likely Castilian 
Spanish too). Don't you have different genders for "España" and "Mexico" in 
Castilian?

> This is much like the plurals issue: gettext handles plurals very
> well now, with a setting for each language. There may well be a way
> for translators of different languages to indicate their gender use,
> to include variations, and eventually, to have a way for gettext to
> pick up on this automatically.

I'm not sure, it's not just word genders. In Italian, there is a "ripple 
effect" on the prepositions: "of the" can become "delle", "degli", "della", 
"del" or "dello". The last two are particularly nasty since they are both 
masculine singular, but depend on the first consonant of the following word; 
if it's a vowel, all singular forms converge to "dell'".

Furthermore, in languages like German you don't just have similar compounds 
("im", "ins", "vom"...), but you have the added difficulty of declinations, 
which might have an effect on the word ending as well ("das Herz, des 
Herzens", or "the heart, of the heart").

Now, I know just a few languages, but surely those who know others will find 
many other quirks.

Given the structure of KGeography, I believe a small design change is needed: 
the problem is that every question is asked in full ("The capital of Namibia 
is..."), and some colons or a tabular structure might to better: "Contry: %1, 
Capital: ?". It does not look as nice, but someone will actually finish the 
translation.

Just my two cents...

-Federico

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