[josm-dev] Translation

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab at gmail.com
Tue Dec 23 19:26:15 GMT 2008


On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>>
>> No it is not a good idea, the former assumes that all languages share
>> English sentence structure, which they do not.
>
> Well I wasn't suggesting intra-sentence building blocks like
>
> message = tr("You have") + " ";
> if (!won) message += tr("not") + " ";
> message += "won the jackpot!";
>
> It is obvious that such constructs won't work. But concatenation on the
> scale I mentioned must be possible in all languages, otherwise they are
> unsuitable for procedural code execution.


Any sort of concatenation such as the example you cited should be
avoided. It will fail in e.g. RTL languages or languages where it
simply makes sense to write "Try again, as the program was busy with
other things" instead of "Busy with other things. Try again".

> Think of a loop structure that
> outputs a headline ("Calculation results:") and then loops over the results
> and prints them - if you say there are languages where one cannot even rely
> on such sequential structure then these languages are unsuitable targets for
> translation of computer programs, are they not?

That was not what I was saying, but this example doesn't seem to
involve concatenation of translated strings, rather the printing of
one translated string as the name of the dialog followed by some
output.

But in any case if you have some actual examples of strings in JOSM
you're thinking of combining it would be helpful to see them.


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