[OSM-dev] Improve the Driving Instructions ... - more flexible grammar

["Marc Schütz"]

> On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:06:43 +0200, Eddy Petrișor
> <eddy.petrisor at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Pascal Neis a scris:
> >> Hi,
> >> to improve the driving instructions on openrouteservice.org I put
> >> all my languages/translations with a template in the Wiki.
> >> See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRouteService/Instructions
> >> 
> >> atm there are the following translations:
> >> # de_DE - German
> >> # de_DE_dialects - German dialects
> >> # en_EN - English
> >> # nl_NL - Dutch
> >> # fr_FR - French
> >> # es_ES - Spanish
> >> # it_IT - Italien
> >> # se_SE - Swedish
> >> 
> >> Feel free to modify or to create new proposals for any language you 
> >> liked ...
> > 
> > Your proposal assumes that every language of the earth follows the same
> > topic and word order as the English language which is incorrect.
> > 
> > Your attempt is doomed to fail if you'll try to constraint the world
> > into your wolrd view.
> 
> Hello Eddy,
> 
> the aproach on
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Sample_driving_instructions
> with MessageFormats (phrases with markers where to insert
> text-constants) seems to work fine and is what gettext and
> the i18n-aproach in Java are using.
> 
> We have run into issues with the posibility of languages having
> multiple plural forms and adopted the solution gettext() is using.
> One simple expression to return the index of the plural form to use
> based on the number.
> 
> In the case of finish
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Sample_driving_instructions/fi_FI
> we encountered the issue that
> a) spoken and written instructions may differ
>  (ignored for now)
> b) numbers/counts may differ based on what they refer to.
>  (worked around for this one case but may come up again)

Then there are those languages that have grammatical gender. The English "Turn right into xxx street/way" for example, would be "Biege rechts ab in die xxx-Straße/in den xxx-Weg" in German, where the article "den" or "die" depends on the name of the street. This is currently worked around by leaving the article out completely.

Other languages have the habit of inflecting not only normal nouns but also names.

Isn't there software out there that can handle these things? Maybe we should have a look at MediaWiki. They seem to take grammar into account.

Regards, Marc

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