CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

If you have an adjective like "new", it remains the same in English, but in German, French and other languages it changes according to the gender. So when you see "Neu Mitgliedsunternehmen", it looks very unprofessional, even more in a heading of the sign-up page. The same goes for French: it's "nouveau" or "nouvelle", depending on the gender. So we should look for a solution for that. The very minimum would be to change it in this example to "neue(s)" (if we are sure that it's used as an adjective and not as a predicative expression) and "nouveau/nouvelle" etc.

I have no clue if other websites try to combine an adjective that is being translated with a free choosable noun in all possible languages, and that's what we're doing in the sign-up page.

Actually there is "neuer" (sg m), "neue" (sg f), "neues" (sg n), just for this case and "neue" for pl., and "neu" for predicative use. ("Das ist neu.") And that was just nominative.

I don't have an easy solution for that either. Just some ideas:

• Let the user enter the suitable adjective
• translate all possible declinations and and let the user choose the gender
• avoid these combinations

But we can't use the predicative form ("neu") which is wrong for all three grammatical genders.

And in Transifex you don't even see the context of the word to be translated, so this way it's unlikely that a translator is even aware of this problem.

For making professional translations, there is no way around having a context that is visible while you translate. If this is currently not possible in Transifex, we should talk to them. It's also in their interest that their tool is usable and helps in creating good translations.

Btw, this is the reason I prefer pons.eu over leo.org as an online dictionary. The first one is like normal dictionary, while the latter has mainly word by word translations.

For distinguishing home (page) and home (address), giving a context is sufficient.

For the issue that I reported, leaving out the translation of "new" in this case would be an option, at least it would be much better than having the translation "neu" that is always wrong and looks really bad, no matter which of the three grammatical genders in German the contact type is. Either avoid this combination completely or use an empty string in the translation of languages with different genders that could apply in this case.

What's your opinion on this?

Can you give specific examples in CiviCRM for "new"? I don't have any under hand, but I have sometimes noticed:

$something = ts('individual');
if ($x) {
  $something = ts('organization');
}

echo ts('New ') . $something;

The above is a bug. It should really be more specific:

if ($x) {
  echo ts('New organisation');
}
else {
  echo ts('New individual');
}

As for context, we could add it in the code.. but I suppose we would need context conventions?

Currently, we have only 1 real context: "menu". And probably we could use that for 'Home'. It would not be a hack, because it does indeed refer to the menu item. (nb: we also have contexts for countries/provinces).

However, I don't really have experience on how contexts are usually used in i18n. A good starting point would be to have a list of problematic terms somewhere with concrete examples. We could try to fix the code where possible, and where it's not, use a context (ex: "To").

Ah, and Transifex does provide some context when translating: if you click on a string, towards the bottom of the pane, there is a "more information" pane that can be opened, and that shows the exact file / line of code where the string can be found. Although... for more translators, that is way too technical.