Re: [Phpwiki-talk] About languages

[Reini U. <ru...@x-...>]

Carsten Klapp schrieb:
> Today while I was adding a few more German translations to the
> template/Edit.html I realized a small problem in using the _("text")
> function to translate localized text, has this already been discussed?
> 
> Different languages have different word ordering. When a key word needs to
> be added to the end of a sentence in english, it might need to be inserted
> into the middle of the sentence in another language.
> 
> For example:
> 
> English:
> $_("Author will be logged as") <i>${USERID}</i>.
> 
> German:
> $_("Der Autor wird als") <i>${USERID}</i> aufgenommen.
> 
> Is there an existing way around this? Without a code-based solution Wiki
> may be stuck with individual localized templates.

The standard answer is sprintf. 
  sprintf(_("Der Autor wird als %s aufgenommen"), "<i>$USERID</i>")

But this imposes problems to at least my hord of inexperienced translators.
(they don't know about %s or %d, they don't know what value will be inserted, 
which variable, and how many % vars need to be inserted)

So I use a limited set of variables which get expanded at run-time from 
the definitions strings. 

something like:
  register_gettext_expansion('USERID');
  echo x_('Der Autor wird als $USERID aufgenommen');

writing this from scratch... (totally untested. I use a completely 
different translation scheme on my current project. translators do it online).
I register only uppercase vars for this. 

function register_gettext_expansion ($var) {
  if (!is_array($GLOBALS['GETTEXT_VARS']))
    $GLOBALS['GETTEXT_VARS'] = array();
  $GLOBALS['GETTEXT_VARS'][] = $var; 
}

function x_($msg) {
  $msg =  gettext($msg);
  // this could be improved to expand on all vars in the msg, 
  // not on all existing vars...
  if (!(($i = strpos($msg, '$')) === false) and 
      (substr($msg,$i-1,1) != '\\')) {
    foreach ($GLOBALS['GETTEXT_VARS'] as $s) {
      if (!empty($GLOBALS[$s]))
        $msg = str_replace('$' . $s, $GLOBALS[$s], $msg);
    }
  }
  return $msg;
}

The problem is that $ must be quoted and that I did't check for that in 
my old version. Luckily I don't have us money in my strings :)

Another problem is that the gettext extraction tools only recognize 
_("") and not _(''). so we must use
  echo x_("Der Autor wird als \$USERID aufgenommen");

-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/