264344 - term.[a]bug and friends are hard to translate

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, enhancement)

Description

[David Philippi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

I'm working on the german translation of Bugzilla and while I'm nearing the end
(for 2.18rc2 that is), I'm still getting annoyed bei the problem presented
through those variables. I can't say how it is for other languages (although I
know many have similar problems) but in german the problem is:
terms.abug can mean "ein Fehler", "eines Fehlers", "der Fehler" or "des Fehlers"
or terms.bug may be "Fehler" as well as "Fehlers" - always depending on the
surrounding sentence. If it's used as in [% terms.bug %]report, translating
get's even harder sometimes. So in the end, I've got occurences of "[% terms.bug
%]", "[% terms.bug %]s" or even no variable at all if it's making no sense at
all. In the end, the nice idea behind those variables is completely dead - if
someone changes their translation, lot's of sentences won't make sense anymore.
A different translation then "Fehler" may get something else then an additional
"s" at the same point so [% terms.bug %]s is completely wrong for that translation.
For that reason, I'd like to question wheter they're really usefull with regards
to supporting i18n.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

In my opinion, the variables are of more use for customization than for
translation. You can easily turn "bug" into "issue" with them, but I think you
need a different set of variables for, say, German, as you noted.

So I'd say when translating, your most productive way to go is to set up a
variables.none.html that fits the language.

For German, you can easily have the set of variables get out of hand for the
reasons you stated: if you want full customazibility to be able to turn "Fehler"
into "Anliegen" or "Punkt" editing variables.none.tmpl only, you'd need quite a lot:

terms.fehler:              "Fehler"       <=> "Anliegen"     <=> "Punkt"
terms.fehler_nomPlur:      "Fehler"       <=> "Anliegen"     <=> "Punkte"
terms.einenfehler_accSing: "einen Fehler" <=> "ein Anliegen" <=> "einen Punkt"
terms.derfehler_genPlur:   "der Fehler"   <=> "der Anliegen" <=> "der Punkte"

...and that's just starting. I can see no way that is simpler but equally
comprehensive, so <unsolicited>I recommend not using variables at all when
translating to German</unsolicited>.

Comment 2

[David Philippi]

Yes, that's more or less what's done in the current translation. The variables
are still there in most cases but if someone changes their translation in
variable.none.tmpl then only a tiny part of the actual work is done. It's sad to
loose some flexibility through translating but such variables will work only in
a few languages like english with a rather simple grammar. 

Unless someone else comes up with a better idea, I'll probably phase them out as
the translations need to be changed to adapt to newer version of the templates.

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Obviously we'd like all translations to have a similar system, but It's fine to
phase them out in your translation if it's not practical. I understand some
languages would have such a large collection of different variables that it's
not practical.

Gerv

Comment 4

[Vitaly Fedrushkov]

See also bug 407752