Re: [Tikiwiki-devel] i18n.tiki.org for *english* text?

[Torsten F. <tor...@va...>]

Hello Rick and all,

my 2ct:

As a german native speaker, my native syntax is not so far away from 
English, than languages from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa etc.. For me 
translating might perhabs be easier than for a Korean or Arabic translator.

So from this point of view I would agree, that sure we should look after 
all languages and prevent unnecessary difficulties related to 
translation and such.

On the other hand I like to have (need) a good "base reference", that 
means one English standart with very clean wellmade speech, wordings, 
syntax, language.

I do not mind, if this base would be US, UK, Oxford, Irish or what else 
English, but ONE standart we should have as a reference.

That would ease my live as translator and after that we could discuss 
the local versions in the hopefully local language user groups and 
figure things out.

+1 for Ricks plan to make a decent review of the english original. 
Interactive or not - what ever would workout best.

Cheers
Torsten





Am 26.10.2010 20:53, schrieb ric...@ke...:
> I completely agree that this causes infinite problems for translators.
>
> However, I can tell you what every single end-user is going to say.... "I
> don't care."
>
> Your example of using {tr}on{/tr} and {tr}at{/tr} are perfect examples.
> One of the first customizations that I do for *every* Tiki I install is to
> modify the longdatetime and shortdatetime formats to include "on" and "at"
> text.
>
> Instead of seeing text like:  Last updated Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:08:50 -0700
>
> My end-users see: Last updated on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 at 11:08:50 -0700
>
> This comes from knowing your users. An English-speaking USA native expects
> things to happen *ON* dates and *AT* times; the fist example looks "wrong"
> to folks (even though it is technically fine). These are the little things
> at which Tiki (IMHO) utterly fails at... this is what makes Tiki (again,
> IMHO) look "unpolished" when compared with Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress/etc.
>
> There are lots (and LOTS) of very minor things that I, as an
> English-speaking USA native look at in Tiki and cringe. I want to fix them
> in order to improve the overall Tiki experience, but I do not want to cause
> issues for other languages; since English is used as the "master" language
> in the TPLs, anything that I change will cause ripples for other folks. I
> was hoping that the interactive translation stuff would make it possible
> for me to "fix" these issues.
>
> I have no solutions to offer... only my observations. :-(
>
>
> -R
>
> On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 11:08:50 -0700 (PDT), gezza nagy<ge...@ya...>
> wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> one note to the proposed new sentence
>>
>>> {tr}If you use an email filter, be sure to add{/tr}
>>> {$prefs.sender_email|default:"{tr}this domain{/tr}"} {tr}to your
> accepted
>>> list{/tr}.
>>>
>> This would appear in 3 pieces in the translation list, right? If not
> than
>> ignore
>> the rest of my mail :)
>>
>> A sentence that is broken into pieces can be quite hard to translate to
> a
>> language that has different logic of sentence building than the latein
>> languages. Eg: the standalone usage of {tr}of{\tr} and {tr}by{\tr} in
> many
>> places is a pain for my language where such strings come after and not
>> before
>> the related item (person/timestamp, etc), so during translation I have
> to
>> replace them with a space as NULL is not commited to the DB which makes
>> the
>> outcome weird.
>>
>> I would suggest to use whole, closed sentences that have meaning on
> their
>> own
>> than put the data/function separately. For example: {tr}Last modified
>> by:{\tr},
>> {tr}Last modified at:{ \tr}, etc
>>
>> anyway, so how about this:
>> {tr}Please note: If you use email filters than it is necessary to add
> this
>> domain to your list of accepted domains{/tr}
>> {tr}Example: {/tr}{$prefs.sender_email|default:"{tr}Name of this
>> domain{/tr}"}
>>
>> maybe I messed up the syntax but I hope you get my point :)
>>
>> thanks&cheers,
>> gezza
>>
>>