Question about grammatical case when “humanizing” dates

[Max Merz]

Hello everybody,

I am the author of a pull request to fix Django bug #21408
<https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21408>, which concerns the German
translation of the phrases “X days ago” and “X days from now”. Up until
now, these phrases were translated into German with “vor X Tage” and “in X
Tage”, while the correct translation would have been “vor X Tagen” and “in
X Tagen” (this corresponds to the Dative inflection of the word “Tag”).
The problem lies in the fact that Django's implementation does not
translate the phrase “X days ago” as one, but rather translates the phrases
“
 ago” and “X days” separately, and puts the two translations together
afterwards. I tried to fix the bug for the German language by introducing a
`naturaltime` context to pass to `npgettext_lazy` when translating “X
days”, so that it would translate to “X Tagen”. (The same holds for “
 from
now”.)

When reviewing the changes in my pull request
<https://github.com/django/django/pull/9777>, Claude Paroz noted that there
might be languages in which a differentiation between “X days ago” and “X
days from now” is needed.
My (our) question is now: Are there any such languages, and if yes, could
you provide an example?

Thank you very much in advance :)

Cheers
Max

[Fòram na Gàidhlig]

Hi Max,

thanks for looking into this!

To answer your question: Always, always, always present the translators
with full sentences, no exceptions. Even if the current hard-coding
should work for 50 languages that have been tested, language #51 will
come along and have a different word order and screw things up.

So, the string markup should be "X days ago" and "In X days", with no
hard-coded word order at all. You're already taking the plural forms
into account by using npgettext, so that bit is correct.

Scottish Gaelic examples:

2 days ago:
2 latha air ais

3 days ago:
3 làithean air ais

In 2 days:
An ceann 2 latha

In 3 days:
An ceann 3 làithean

I hope that helps.

Cheers

GunChleoc

Post by Max Merz
Hello everybody,
I am the author of a pull request to fix Django bug #21408
<https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/21408>, which concerns the German
translation of the phrases “X days ago” and “X days from now”. Up until
now, these phrases were translated into German with “vor X Tage” and “in
X Tage”, while the correct translation would have been “vor X Tagen” and
“in X Tagen” (this corresponds to the Dative inflection of the word “Tag”).
The problem lies in the fact that Django's implementation does not
translate the phrase “X days ago” as one, but rather translates the
phrases “… ago” and “X days” separately, and puts the two translations
together afterwards. I tried to fix the bug for the German language by
introducing a `naturaltime` context to pass to `npgettext_lazy` when
translating “X days”, so that it would translate to “X Tagen”. (The same
holds for “… from now”.)
When reviewing the changes in my pull request
<https://github.com/django/django/pull/9777>, Claude Paroz noted that
there might be languages in which a differentiation between “X days ago”
and “X days from now” is needed.
My (our) question is now: Are there any such languages, and if yes,
could you provide an example?
Thank you very much in advance :)
Cheers
Max
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[Claude Paroz]

Post by Fòram na Gàidhlig
Hi Max,
thanks for looking into this!
To answer your question: Always, always, always present the translators
with full sentences, no exceptions. Even if the current hard-coding
should work for 50 languages that have been tested, language #51 will
come along and have a different word order and screw things up.
So, the string markup should be "X days ago" and "In X days", with no
hard-coded word order at all. You're already taking the plural forms
into account by using npgettext, so that bit is correct.

Hey GunChleoc,

You know I'm already convinced with this rule, however it's very
difficult (if possible at all) in the present use case, because the
composed string is highly dynamic. It can be:

3 days ago
2 weeks, 3 days ago
1 year, 3 months ago
...

We'll try to come with an improved situation with the patch. Anyone with
a still better implementation idea is welcome to participate.

Claude

Post by Fòram na Gàidhlig

Post by Max Merz
When reviewing the changes in my pull request
<https://github.com/django/django/pull/9777