Translation problems

[Christian Stimming]

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On Sonntag, 19. Oktober 2003 17:41, Derek Atkins wrote:
> How is this handled in other projects?

They can't handle it, either.

> Nikos Charonitakis <frolix68 at yahoo.gr> writes:
> > Some strings like "none" or "New" are reused in many menu messages.
> > In Greek, language names have gender (male,female or neutral).
> > So for example "account" has male gender  "loan" is neutral
> > "invoice" is neutral, "date" is female etc.
> > The problem appears when some buttons/menus appear with female word when
> > male word is needed etc.
> > This happens because i translate the word once and it is used in many
> > places...
> > Can this be fixed?

It cannot be fixed. This is a known shortcoming of the gettext system in 
general. The gettext system is unable to distinguish between different 
occurrences of the same (usually short) string. In German I have the problem 
that the string "tranfer" can either be the noun ("a money transfer") or the 
verb ("to transfer money") and of course these need different translations. 

This issue is long known, but there is still no solution at hand for gnucash. 
I tried to program some code, see src/engine/messages.c, and you can still 
find the reference to 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2001-April/msg00058.html there. But 
we cannot fix this in gnucash alone, because the gettext() call that would 
need to be extended happens inside libglade and not inside gnucash. I.e. the 
code in question is out of reach for us. 

For now we have to live with it. Maybe in the long term the gettext people 
eventually agree on a solution for this. Or maybe even the glade people.

Christian
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