Actually, we do have the ability to give fairly detailed messages based on regular expression matches on the XML path in a "zoomed" view, and soon we will have the ability to require people to go to the zoomed view before editing, and thus see those messages. So we can add specific clarifications on the use of "und" or other special cases.

Mark

On 4/12/07, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

On 4/12/2007 2:25 PM, Kent Karlsson wrote:

>

> FWIW, in CLDR 1.4 some of the translations for "und" has the word "language"

> (translated of course) in them, in accordance with John Cowan's original suggestion:

>

> da.xml:                       <language type="und">Sproget kan ikke bestemmes</language>

> de.xml:                       <language type="und">Sprache nicht ermittelt</language>

> it.xml:                       <language type="und">lingua imprecisata</language>

> sv.xml:                       <language type="und">obestamt sprak</language>

>

The sample translations show that there's general difficulty in agreeing

on the concept. The German translation says "no language (has been)

determined", while the Danish translation says that "no language could

be determined". In my reading the Swedish allows both possibilities, but

perhaps implies more strongly than the other two that assigning a

language to the contents would be meaningful. (The Italian translation

seems to most closely agree with the Swedish one to the extent of my

command of Italian)

> (I would be to blame for the last one, but apparently I'm not the only one to (maybe)

> be misguided). Perhaps those ones should be retranslated not to refer to language,

> **if** "und" may apply also to "maybe not in any language".

>

>

The problem is that the scheme does not explicitly accounts for all the

types of edge conditions that you can get into when analyzing text for

language up front. Instead, labels are added here and there to handle

some of these as they become urgent enough to require attention. As a

result, all the translators have to go by is the shorthand English

description for the label. And that's not written with enough precision

to overcome the limitation of not having thought through all the

possible cases.

A./

--
Mark