RE: [TFUI] Re: Locale independence and grammatical structure

I missed the original, but one of the quoted bits in Phlip's (excellent)
reply
caught my eye:

> qazsedcft wrote:
>> We may want to use the nationality as a  noun or an 
> > adjective, or use it possessively, or distinguish by gender and 
> > number, etc. In English it is fairly simple to plug the name in and 
> > add an s or 's or a few articles. However, in languages with 
> > inflections it's quite a bit more complicated.

What you're describing - in English - is generally considered a bad
practice by those with experience in localization. So rather than
adding complexity in order to allow pluralizing, changing case, etc.
in other languages, I suggest you remove complexity by storing
every phrase separately. 

Taking it a step further, you should not practice the "efficiency" of 
storing little phrases to be combined into sentences. Just store every
string you need to display separately, as Phlip suggested. Storage
efficiency is not that big a deal. Program complexity is. And the
time and effort of the localizers is definitely a big deal.

Suggestion: Use comments in a text file - or an extra column in
a database - to tell the localizers how each string is used.

Charlie




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