Re: Japanese translation

[John Darrington]

[CC address@hidden

On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 09:51:09AM +0900, Tetsuya SUGA [titech] wrote:
     Dear Harry,
     
     Please see the attached ja.po file.
     When I sent this ja.po to the TP-robot, it rejected with the following
     email replay.
     ( in this version of ja.po, I mistakenly copied the original English
     msgid to the msgstr which is not translated yet, as John pointed out.
     Now the latest ja.po file has msgstr "" for untranslated msgid.)
     
     
     ***> As a last check, I ran 'msgfmt -cv -o /dev/null' on your PO file.  It
     told me that I cannot let the file pass.  It reported these errors:
     > pspp-0.8.1.ja.po:7: nplurals = 1...
     > pspp-0.8.1.ja.po:305: ...but some messages have 2 plural forms
     > msgfmt: found 1 fatal error
     > 1714 translated messages, 97 fuzzy translations, 4 untranslated messages.
     
     
     I think, in Dutch pspp-0.8.1.nl.po, you use
        "Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1\n"
     So the TP-robot may have accepted nl.po.
     
     But in Japanese,
        "Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;\n"
     is commonly used.
     
     
     In the meantime, I'm contacting to one of Japanese translators.
     
     

Harry,

I know absolutely nothing about Japanese.  But I found this rather pertinent
blog about the subject:

http://japanvisitor.blogspot.de/2011/09/japanese-plural-and-singular.html

Which seems to suggest that whilst Japanese does have plural forms, it is 
perfectly acceptable so speak of everything in the singular.  This would
explain why Tetsuya says that most ja.po files have nplurals=1

On the other hand, PSPP is a mathematical software, and the language used
should perhaps be precise ; I don't know. 

Tetsuya,

By all means contact the Japanese translators,  then make your own decision
about this.  You are the expert amoung us.


(I heard somewhere that Japanese also has a strange system of numbers - eg
the word for "three" depends on the noun it is counting, so "three ships"
would use a different word than "three people".  Languages are wierd! )


J'

     

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