[gcompris-devel] L10N issues when translating colours in GCompris

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

I have just taken a look at the latest git version of GCompris, and it
looks like the translation support for the colours activity has taken a
turn for the worse. Before, there were separate strings:

  Click on the blue duck
  Click on the green duck
  Click on the orange duck
  …

Now it has been replaced by the single string
  Find the {text} duck

This is very bad L10N practice, as simple word insertion doesn’t work in
many language. For example, the form of the noun can depend on the
adjective, or vice versa, or the definite article may depend on
adjective (or perhaps even the word order?). (English has something
similar for the *indefinite* article, where you speak of ‘a blue duck’
but ‘*an* orange duck’.)

For my language, Norwegian Nynorsk, the only problem is the colour
‘purple’, which appears in both the advanced colours board and the duck
board.

So please change the string back so that there is *one* string for each
‘Find the …’ string. (It really doesn’t take long for us translators to
translate these string; it have probably taken me more time to write
this e-mail than it would have taken translating all of them.)


-- 
Karl