Serendipity Forums

Hi, I'm updating the Duth languale file because the translation is incomplete and I'm unhappy with the quality of some parts. Fellow Dutch speakers can follow my progress here (marked with a #-----), I welcome any comments.

I'm going to go through it with a fine comb, which means I'll be asking some very nitpicky questions here. If you think I'm going to far, feel free to tell me, I can take a hint.

First question: why do some sentences end in a full stop and others don't? Compare HAVE_TO_BE_LOGGED_ON with MYSQL_REQUIRED.

My progress with this translation will probably be slow, because I can't always find the time to work on it. So you don't have to answer my questions immediately.

Hi!

Sadly the missing full stop sometimes is just because different developers added the strings, andsome of them added a "." and some didn't. I guess this would need unification in alllanguage files, as there is no reason for this.

I think having it all with a full stop should be the propper way.

Thanks for your work on the file, we can sure use it!

Bestregards
,Garvin

OK, I'll model my translation after the English file for now. After that I'll have a look at normalizing everything (or at least the languages that I'm familiar with).

Btw, a big thank you to you and the rest of the developers for all your work on Serendipity. It's very much appreciated.

Hi!

Thanks for that work. And without users like you, there wouldn't be any Serendipity!

Best regards,
Garvin

Next inconsistency: Capitals.
Compare EDIT_ENTRIES, MANAGE_DIRECTORIES and BACK_TO_BLOG.

I think only the first word should be capitalized. In a title all words may be capitalized, but I don't know (yet) if some strings are used as a title as well as 'regular' text.
I'm speaking for English (and Dutch) here of course, because I believe it's different for German?

The word "entry" currently has several translations:

- artikel
- bijdrage
- inzending
- bericht
- interessegebied

All but the last one are fine, but I think it's better to use just one of them. "Bijdrage" seems to be used the most, but "artikel" feels more appropriate to me. So unless anyone objects, I'm going to use "artikel".

In German, all nouns are in capitals (alle zelfstandige naamwoorden dus ). Or not? That's what our teacher is trying to teach us, anyway.

And for some more information: Titles should not be in capitals, but they should be written in italics. That's another lesson of the great teachers.

I agree that titles should not be completely in capitals. What I meant before was that the first letter of every (important) word might be capitalized. I have browsed through some magazines and noticed that the default is to only capitalize the first word, just like a regular sentence. I had never really payed attention to that before. Doing this translations proves to be a bigger learning experience than I had thought.

More post-translation work: remove redundant whitespace like in REMEMBER_INFO.

I've found something weird: NO_ENTRIES_BLAHBLAH has a dot and a newline escape after the string and outside the single quotes. They are not printed to the screen. Is this a bug or am I not getting something?

And some more:
According to Tips for Webmasters (and further reading), shouldn't COMMENT_ADDED_CLICK be more like

Possible bug:
If you post an empty comment in a popup window, it just says

Your comment did not contain anything, please go back

instead of

Your comment did not contain anything, please go back and try again

Is there a or missing in commentpopup.tpl? (Just guessing here, I don't know anything about PHP or Smarty, I'm only grepping through the files.)

When you click on a date in the calendar, you get all entries for that date, with the heading "Entries from Sunday, January 14. 2007".

Two remarks about this:
- Why is there a dot after the day of the month in the English language file? I think that should either be nothing or a comma.
- Why is the first letter of the weekday expressly capitalized with serendipity_mb('ucfirst',...)? As far as I can tell (PHP is not as hard as I thought ), PHP knows by itself which locales need capitalization and which don't (Dutch doesn't).

Hi!

About your commentpopup.tpl: You are right on that, many thanks. Just committed a fix for this to our repository.

About the date: The "." comes from the abbreviation of the date. It usually should read "January 14th". But we could not append a "th" by default because for 1, 2 and 3 that would be invalid. And we didn't have the motivation to code a function for the right appending, thus we used the "." there in english

- Why is the first letter of the weekday expressly capitalized with serendipity_mb('ucfirst',...)? As far as I can tell (PHP is not as hard as I thought ), PHP knows by itself which locales need capitalization and which don't (Dutch doesn't).

Well...*cough*...I suppose no one knew about default capitalization and wanted to make sure of that in code instead of relying on locales. The trouble of locales is that different systems take different approachs. It might be on FreeBSD that weekdays are not capitalized, on Windows it might be all uppercase. Yeah, I figure that's a lame excuse, but we would have to go through each system to make sure that all locale implementations specifiy upper/lowercasing?

Best regards,
Garvin

Ah, I see. Now I think about it, I would also rather just put a dot than implement it "the right way", because then you would have to do it for every language, which can get pretty messy, I guess.

I assumed that PHP had its own locale implementation, instead of relying on that of the OS. Anyway, it doesn't matter that much.

Good news: my translation is just about finished (I'll add that last line you added on Jan 22 tomorrow). Some more questions:

- I've worked with the UTF-8 version. Is that enough for you or do I need to make the other version too?
- Is it custom to add your name at the top? It would be fun to have my name in the first Free software project I've contributed to (and I want to show off to my friends, of course ).

Hi!

- I've worked with the UTF-8 version. Is that enough for you or do I need to make the other version too?

That's enough for my, I can do automatic recoding to ISO-8859-1!

- Is it custom to add your name at the top? It would be fun to have my name in the first Free software project I've contributed to (and I want to show off to my friends, of course ).

Yes, we want to pay credit where credit is due! You did a lot of work, and you should definitely list your name there!

Best regards,
Garvin