widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[GunChleoc <fios@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Floating point numbers can also become integers
> I don't see how that is relevant, what's it in response to?

Let's say the value is currently 25.5 - then you would need to translate "%d seconds" with the floating point translation in Slovak. If the value changes to 25, you would need to change your translation - but how would you know? How would a programmer who is not aware of the issue know to give you a hint?


> Natural Languages normally have no idea about floating point numbers. But they
> can use fractions (will be ready in half a minute, can be done in a quarte of
> an hour). Some progress messages use phrases like "less then 5 seconds
> remaining" or "estimating 20 min for the Installation".

Not true. I can say "twenty-five point six seconds" just fine in any natural language on the planet. And Miroslav just stated that his language has special plural forms for floating point numbers ;)

To give you some examples. English and German will simply use the plural, Gaelic will say "five over twenty second point six" (the number 20 takes the singular, so it's "second", not "seconds")

Or maybe I'm just using too much linguist-speak here - "natural language" it meant as opposed to artificial language - i.e. Russian, not C++. It does not mean "what sounds more natural to you, how would you say it naturally?"


> So we should provide a well defined and _known_ way to handle floats but
> encourage the programmers to use some of the above mentioned, or better,
> ideas.
> 
> So we might use floor _or_ round but only one of these and then stick with it.

The problem here is that it can give incorrect translations for some languages. There is nothing more annoying for translator than having grammar errors forced on them by a piece of software they're translating. It's the translator who will get blamed for it by the user, and not being able to fix it is very frustrating. I have been down that road many times.


> So we should make this a tranlators hint on the homepage and merge this branch
> :-).

I'd rather have consensus on what we want to do first - this is "just" a bunch of tests, so there is no hurry merging this.


-- 
https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/test-ngettext/+merge/291587
Your team Widelands Developers is subscribed to branch lp:~widelands-dev/widelands/test-ngettext.