[PHPiCalendar-DEV] Translations

[Greg W. <gr...@gr...>]

I was just reading through the Japanese translation, because I was
thinking about updating it to include all the new 0.9 stuff, when I
realized that we might need to rethink the way in which we do
translations, because not all languages use the same syntax as English.
For example, with the "RSS-enabled" text, the footer.inc.php file writes
$this_site_is_lang and then the link that says "RSS-Enabled".  That works
out find in English, because you get "This site is RSS-Enabled".  But in
Japanese, the sentence structure (at least in the sentence Jared used) is
such that the PHP would have to write some Japanese before RSS-Enabled,
and some after.  As it is, it says something more like "This site is.
RSS-Enabled", which sounds almost right in English because it just looks
like stray punctuation, but it's totally wrong in Japanese.

As a fix for this particular issue, I'd suggest that "kono uebusaito ha
desu." simply have the "desu." removed from the end, for the
$this_site_is_lang variable.  That would make things gramatically correct.
(I can't figure out how to edit the file properly, or I'd do it myself...
I can't get it to show up as Japanese in any text editor)  But this speaks
to the larger issue of not always being able to rely on the sentence
structure being the same in other languages.  What do you think we should
do to fix this?  I suppose one way would be to use functions rather than
variables, and so for example calling rss_enabled_lang() would write the
entire sentence plus link based on the language.  I would think that if we
do that, we'll want the functions to return PHP code that can then be
interpreted in the file that calls the function, rather than returning the
final HTML code, as then we don't have to deal with variable scope or
variable passing.

Am I making any sense?  What does everyone else think?  Maybe this isn't a
big enough issue to worry about right now, but it's something to think
about...

Greg

P.S.  Jared, if you could tell me how to edit that file properly, it would
be much appreciated.  I generally use BBEdit for stuff like this that I
can't do in vim, and can write, save, and reopen files containing
Japanese, but for some reason just see gibberish in place of Japanese when
I open japanese.inc.php.  Thanks!

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