On 2/27/07, Natto Lover <natto_lover@operamail.com> wrote:

Hi.
I wondered if I could help translating the resource
file to Japanese. But I noticed some problems, so I
want to let it to be known.

First, I couldn't find a preferred way to contribute
resource file translations. Its a common topic in a
project like this, so I think it should be clearly
documented in an easily found place.

Second, I found out that in a couple of cases, the
resource string items contain small fragments of
sentences, rather than full sentences.  This makes it
impossible or hard to provide a meaningful translation
in languages that have different syntax structures
like Japanese.  You need to make much more use of
the parameters like {0} and {1} and write the full
sentence.

I will show the ones that I noticed.

helponsyntax=Help on the

I haven't seen this on the xwiki UI yet. I think this sentence
is followed by a text box or a pulldown.  So the actual sentence
is probably like:

Help on the [____].

But in Japanese the sentence structure has to be something like

[_____] no help wo hyoji.

So adding the label on the left of the UI doesn't work.
For very simple statements, english has the structure
Verb + object.
Japanese has the structure
Object + verb.

Also I noticed a line:
youcan=You can

In English you write "You can [do something]", but in Japanese,
you write "[do something] dekimasu".  So a successful resource
string would be
youcan=You can {0}.
and the Japanese version would be
youcan={0} dekimasu.

If the "You can" was followed by a structure of UI elements
such as a list of checkbox items,  A translation friendly
label would be a full sentence like "You can do the following:".

I stopped translating the file after working on it for about
3 minutes because I felt that there would be many of these.
I hope the structure gets revised.  I hope even more that someone
else translates it to Japanese :-P

I like the software itself.  It has features that I am looking for.

--
natto is japanese food.
I chose it for my alias.