Dear CB developers,

I have already tried to draw your attention to this once [1], but I still hope you can start considering I18N and L10N issues a bit more seriously in the future if you'd like your software to be adopted worldwide more.

String substitution might seem great to the developer as it makes coding easier, but string substitution rules that work for English simply do not work in many other languages, for reasons of capitalization rules, gender, plural rules, noun declension, word order, etc.

Pretty please, have this in mind when adding new functionality and strings to CB, the new cbteamplugins_language.php is full of them which cannot be properly and meaningfully localized.

[1] www.joomlapolis.com/component/option,com_joomlaboard/Itemid,38/func,view/catid,64/id,79044/#79044

Post edited by: kmilos, at: 2009/02/01 19:46

I am really (unpleasantly) surprised that among so many translators and languages represented in CB no one has any comment on this issue. Is there no desire to make this software better for non-English users?

Just to give you an example, broken constructions like:

'%s added a new %s'

with substitution of the second string with

'picture'
'profile book'
'profile gallery'
'wall'

is much better served with

'%s added %s'

with

'a new picture'
'a new profile book'
'a new profile gallery'
'a new wall'

because gender of the noun moderates the adjective, at least in my language (Serbian), but I know it is so for many others, like German for example.

Post edited by: kmilos, at: 2009/02/21 17:15

Beat, thank you very much for picking up on this and including it on the tracked issues list.

Also, is gettext based I18N at all on the radar for future CB developments?

I have already contributed official Serbian translations for 1.2 [1], but can't promise to keep updating, all depends on real life work load

[1] www.joomlapolis.com/component/option,com_mtree/task,listcats/cat_id,178/Itemid,55/