[pmwiki-users] authentication problems (built-in and authuser)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Bronwyn Boltwood schrieb:
> It'll be a handy upgrade; might have kept me from crawling quite as far up
> the wall as I did. :)  Um...what about getting translations for the entire
> phrases
> - incorrect username/password combination
> - privileges required by
> 
> And word-by-word for
> - read
> - edit
> - diff or history
> - upload
> - attr
> - admin
> - site
> - group
> - page

Word-by-word translations don't work. Many languages require grammatic 
correspondences between words that are related in any way.

The only thing that you can substitute by-word is, essentially, names.
I.e. you can do things like

   You need "%1" privileges for action "%2"

which is horrible style but allows doing word-by-word translations.

Oh, you could also do word-by-word translations if it's clear what 
context a word gets substituted into. I.e. you can do things like

denial = You need %1 %2 rights to %3.
# The following go into %1 and are qualifiers for %2 (below)
site = site
group = group
page = page
# The following are privileges that go into %2:
read = read
edit = write
diff = diff/history
upload = upload
# These are privilegable actions:
source = see the source of this page
edit = edit this page

A German translation could then look like this:
denial = Ohne das Recht zum %2 für %1 können Sie nicht %3.
# %1
site = das Wiki
group = die aktuelle Gruppe
page = diese Seite
# %2
read = Lesen
edit = Bearbeiten
diff = Zugriff auf alte Versionen
upload = Hochladen
# %3
source = den Quelltext dieser Seite abrufen
edit = die Seite ändern

It's taxing to translate such a bunch of phrase fragments well. Heck, 
it's already difficult to foresee what sounds well in the original language!
So while this approach is certainly feasible, it should be avoided if 
possible.


One could place each variable element of a message in a separate 
sentence. That's usually easier to translate, at the price of some 
verbosity.


Just talking from my days of translating a software that constructed 
entire paragraphs of text from fragments. This required constructing an 
entire phrase generator, including machinery to slightly alter words 
according to grammatical context - it was a lot of fun to do, but it 
also required a *lot* of work to get it right, both when programming the 
machinery and when writing the actual translations.

Regards,
Jo