[translations] Limitations of the source-string-centric approach

[Hans Salvisberg]

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