Fw: Translation for time zone conversion runner

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Natalie Clarius skreiv 12.02.2023 05:16:
> What I can offer is to make the syntax even simpler. In a previous 
> version, I had the input format as "<from-timezone> <time> 
> <to-timezone>", e.g. "Berlin 8:00 UTC" to convert 08:00 Berlin time to 
> UTC. It was suggested to change it to the "8:00 Berlin in UTC" style 
> because, on the one hand, it was similar to what we already have in 
> the unit conversion runner, and on the other hand, they (a native 
> English speaker) considered it more intuitive. But I see now that this 
> causes more problems than it solves, because it is pretending a 
> complexity of understanding that isn't there, and won't work for 
> languages that aren't English. So I am now leaning towards changing 
> the input format to "<from-timezone> <time> <to-timezone>", which 
> doesn't have any bells and whistles to cause wrong expectations and 
> inconsistency between languages.

My vote is *for* having the ‘bells and whistles’. The ‘natural’ syntax 
is what I would intuitively use and am familiar with from systems like 
Google and Wolfram Alpha, so that is what I would *try*. Having it makes 
the feature much more discoverable.

For Norwegian, we would like support for more than one translation 
(synonyms) of the ‘in’ keyword. We would use both the translation ‘i’, 
‘på’ and ‘som’. For names of cities and countries, ‘i’ sounds natural:

   15:00 i New York

For names of countries that are also islands, we would use ‘på’ (which 
means ‘on’):

   15:00 på Cuba

For technical names of time zones, ‘som’ (which means ‘as’) sounds more 
natural:

   15:00 som UTC

The words can be treated as synonyms, so it’s not a problem if the user 
types ‘15:00 i UTC’ or ‘15:00 som Cuba’ (even though the latter one 
*sounds* strange for a n native speaker).

Some users might also type the prefix ‘klokka’ (similar to the *suffix* 
‘o’clock’ in English):

   klokka 15:00 i New York

So it would be nice if this was supported, e.g., simply as a list of 
prefixes or suffixes that would be *ignored* when parsing the string.


-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer