Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
That's also an issue I have discovered, for example with the string "Your @type has been created." (with @type being the name of a content type).
I'll explain the problem for people who don't understand the problem: Content type names have a specific gender in most languages; let's take "story", which translates to "Artikel" in German. The word "Artikel" is male, thus the sentence should be "Ihr Artikel wurde erstellt." (Ihr = Your). However, if we use page = Seite, we end up with "Ihr Seite wurde erstellt." The problem here is that "Seite" is female, thus requiring "Ihre" in the German language. This results in grammatically incorrect sentences. A wrong gender is not a minor issue for a native speaker, it really disturbs the reading flow and may shed a bad light on the site creator.
The hungarian team works around this by actually translating '@type has been created'.
I replaced this on my German-language sites with "Ihr Beitrag vom Typ %type wurde gespeichert." ("Your post of type %type has been created.") It's slightly technical, but at least it's grammatically correct. Grammatical errors are not acceptable, but it's often possible to come up with more generic phrases.
Hans