From: Josef 'Jupp' Schugt <jupp@...>
Date: 2003-07-02T20:03:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Message catalogs (I18N) overnight hack...

Saluton!

* Brian Candler; 2003-07-01, 12:05 UTC:
> Also I'd be a bit concerned about phrases where the word order
> might need to be different in different languages:
> 
>     printf("I gave the %s to %s", thing, recipient)
> 
> It could perhaps use tags which were automatically stripped out in
> translation:
> 
>     printf("I gave the <THING:%s> to <RECIP:%s>", thing, recipient)
> 
> Also, do we worry about languages where word endings change
> dependent on function? Languages which require noun.capitalize ?

You forgot something: Word order

printf("%s of %s", 'the house', 'a friend')
tomodachi no ie

I did use latin transcription of Japanese in order to make it
readable. This involves *two* changes:

a) dropping articles 'the' and 'a'
b) reversing word order

'tomodachi' means 'friend' while 'ie' means 'house'.

This problem is the reason why Microsoft did introduce %1, %2, ... in
C#. Ruby's "#{}" is even better.

German does use capitalization of nouns and there are quite a number
of native speakers of that language.

Gis,

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt
-- 
Someone even submitted a fingerprint for Debian Linux running on the
Microsoft Xbox. You have to love that irony :).
                               -- Fyodor on nmap-hackers@insecure.org