[Ocaml-i18n] proposal: message catalogue system

[Benjamin Geer]

sylvain.le-gall at polytechnique.org wrote:
> But in gettext, you have also separate file for translation ! I think it
> is .po ( and .POT ) files. You have only one langage in the source code

If the source code is in English, why should it be easy for the 
marketing department to edit the French translation (which is in a .po 
file), but difficult for them to edit the original English?  Instead of 
typing text in the source code, wouldn't it be better if the programmer 
typed it in a separate file while coding?  It just takes a few more 
seconds to do so.

 > I have seen many
> programs which display COLUMN_TEXT in the first column of a text,
> because it cannot find his own catalog...

Gettext wouldn't stop this from happening, since the programmer can 
always put vague or meaningless text in the source code.  Which the 
marketing department then has to correct.

>>Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \
>>  plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : \
>>    n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;
>>
>>Complexity is inherent in the problem, because languages are complex. 
>>However, I think the syntax above is horrible, and I think the syntax I 
>>proposed would be much easier for a translator to handle.
> 
> Well, as i understand, there is a very complex form for slavic
> languages.

If translators could use a tool whose syntax was easier for them, maybe 
more software would be localised in Slavic languages.

As I understand it, a formula like the one above just allows the 
translator to know which of 3 types of plural forms is needed; but he 
still needs to write the word in each of those forms, in every 
translation.  Especially because the correct form also depends on the 
grammatical case of the noun, and gettext doesn't help with that.  The 
article on Maketext suggests that it would make translators' lives 
easier if they could automate this to some extent, by writing their own 
functions that produced words with the correct plural forms.

But for that, they would need a programming language in which they could 
write those functions.  What I'm proposing is to give them such a 
language, and to have it be the *same* language that they use to write 
trivial substitutions, so they only have to learn one syntax.

 > I promise to have a look at it tonight.

OK, thanks.

Ben