Source string change request / Feature request

[Christian Stimming]

Am Mittwoch, 23. Dezember 2009 schrieb Mark Haanen:
> > >      1. Would it be possible to change the source strings for lines
> > > 2275 in src/gnome/druid-loan.c so that it's no longer a
> > >         concatenation?
> 
> Yes; all other occurrances of "escrow" are sentences, allowing proper
> translation. Of course I cannot guarantee that I won't find more
> examples of a similar nature with other terms/words.

Thanks for pointing out this concatenation, one of the real i18n no-no issues. 
I thought I caught all those throughout the source, but apparently this one 
fell through... well, committed in SVN now.

> > >      2. There are several options programmed into GnuCash which are
> > >         heavily locale-dependent (Income Tax springs to mind). It would
> > >         be nice to either describe this dependency within the strings
> > > of said options (allowing users to steer clear) or to be able to
> > > activate/deactivate these features by selecting additional locales from
> > > the Preferences dialog (while defaulting to the user's defined locale).
> 
> I've noticed several more. In the loan druid, the concepts of Escrow and
> PMI, as wel as the "3/1 Year ARM" and similar interest rates, don't fit
> within the Dutch context. On the other hand, a straight 3-month
> EURIBOR-linked loan is sorely missing, as this is a rather common loan
> type for small & medium businesses. I'll keep a lookout for more locale
> dependencies.

The big problem is that we have no reliable way of determining the actual 
country for which the user wants to use the software. The language only gives 
us the information about the, well, preferred language of the user, but a NL 
user could very well be living in the U.S. and doing her finances for a U.S. 
business there. Or vice versa. Even though in 95% of the cases the user's 
language also represents the country for which the finances are being worked 
on, it is not a 100% decision. 

If the program should activate any country-dependent features, it probably has 
to be done through an extra preference "Country" where the user chooses 
exactly this: The country under whose legislation the finances should be 
managed. This program code change is not quite trivial, but OTOH it isn't too 
complex either; maybe you can file an appropriate enhancement request in 
bugzilla. (But again, we all know what happens to bugzilla enhancement 
requests, so maybe just don't bother...)

For taxes, I tried a simple locale-derived decision before (enabled by --
enable-locale-specific-tax) in src/tax/us/gncmod-tax-us.c (sic!) line 67-79, 
and I left it at this because this is only an experimental feature and I was 
too lazy to add such a book-wide preference for the country. If someone 
introduces that preference, this code would be the first one to use it.

Nevertheless this doesn't simplify the situation for translators - except if 
the e.g. de_DE tax program code simply uses the de_DE strings in the code 
already and isn't marked for translation.

Well, I'm afraid there isn't an easy solution here, is there?

Regards,

Christian