[Localization] Fwd: translation problem

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 12:58:21PM -0500, Erik Blankinship wrote:
> 
>     (2) I believe there is an error in the Arabic file at "constants.py:
>     107". The translated string here reads
> 
>          msgstr "بقي %(1)s دقيقة، و %(2)s ساعة"
> 
>     but I think this should be
> 
>          msgstr "بقي %(1)s دقيقة، و %(2)s ثانية"
> 
> 
> I am confused...    The %(1)s and %(2)s substrings do not appear to be "in one
> piece".  I am afraid this will break our software when run on an xo.  I could
> be wrong; I am new to this.
> 
> Don't we want to get the text to both look right and also have the correct
> ordering of underlying unicode characters?
> 
This depend on your editor, GTK editors will give the text a LTR
directionality, because it starts with a LTR character, making it look
broken, but on the XO the first character will be a RTL and the text
will be ordered correctly. It'll look something like:
بقى 25 دقيقة و 12 ثانية.
In short, we should only take care of logical order, the visual order is
the responsibility of rendering software, which, in case of GTK, does it
pretty well.

> Please take a look at the attached persian po file which we prepared and note
> the readability.  Thank you for help in getting this right.
> 
I don't think explicitly setting the directionality of the text is
needed here, I'm not sure if the text is ordered logically correct,
I tried to strip the special unicode marks from it and got it as:
"مانده ثانیه %(2)s دقیقه %(1)s"
Which, in my guess, it totally incorrect.

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
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