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There was a discussion about UIs in [[#3410618]], so I thought I could submit a wish.
Current Tatoeba UI supports only 1 form of language names, which is a problem when translating into languages where words have several forms. In "French example sentence" and "French" in the language list, words "French" may be different in different languages.
Effectively this means that in the current translations of "French example sentence", Russian has a completely unnatural "Пример предложения, язык французский" (Example sentence, language is French), while Polish has an ungrammatical "Zdanie przykładowe francuski" with "francuski" having an incorrect gender.
Surely we don’t want to have unnatural and ungrammatical sentences in an UI. How can we expect users to submit natural sentences if the site itself uses unnatural ones?
Good point.
Each UI language element has to be separately identified in Launchpad, the translation tool that is being used to create the different Tatoeba locales.
Some of them are actually used as variables in other UI language elements in that tool, in order to avoid multiple (and possibly conflicting) translations of the same element.
But that was done without consideration for the declination problem you mention, because the persons who did had no notion that these could be declined in other languages than the ones they knew.
So although using variables in UI elements looks smart, at first sight, it should be proscribed, and each UI language element should be translatable separately.
I think ideally there should be a way to treat each variable as an array, and the number of elements in that array should be language-dependent.
E.g., so that I can translate "French" as {[NOM] = "французский", [PREP] = "французском"}. And then so that it could be used in text as "%1 example sentence" => "Пример предложения на %1[PREP]".
That would indeed be an elegant solution. But I don't think Launchpad enables this. It's a one to one translation, alas...
Ideally, Tatoeba should be developed on a framework that handles internationalisation, with the management of locales, and not rely on an external tool for localisation.
Tatoeba uses gettext to localize text. The problem you describe can probably be solved by using the so-called contexts [1]. This allows to have different translations of the same original string for different contexts. For instance "French" in the context of a language list may have a different translation than "French" in the context of "French example sentences". Impersonator, do you think this would solve the problem?
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ge.../Contexts.html
> Impersonator, do you think this would solve the problem?
I believe no. Context should be language-dependent (e.g. languages X and Y may have 2 cases; but language X uses case A in strings 1, 2, 3 and case B in strings 4, 5, 6; while language Y uses case A in strings 1, 3, 5 and case B in 2, 4, 6), and gettext doesn't allow this.
Of course, we can create all possible contexts (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), but this would mean making the translation extremely difficult.
I’m thinking about a way to solve this and I’ve explained it into a ticket.
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/404