[Translators-l] TOU notice

[KIZU Naoko]

re: word order

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 7:12 AM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 2012/4/26 James Alexander <jalexander at wikimedia.org>:
>> The banner is up for translation
>> at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use/Banner
>> / http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Translate&group=page-Terms+of+use%2FBanner
>> . I will add the translations already in as I can but if anyone else has a
>> couple minutes to help please feel free to so that we can get it up to par.
>> Sadly I have a conference today and have to leave for a session in 5 minutes
>> or so. If it isn't done I'll finish it when I'm done with that.
>
> Thanks, but unless i'm missing something, there's a problem: that's
> what we call a "lego message" in our jargon. It is made of several
> pieces and assume an English word order. In Hebrew the natural word
> order would be "Terms of use new our etc."

Fearing it would be too late to solve it, so my words are for the
record or future lesson:
the problem Amir pointed came from the structure/order of those three
messages: it assumes the word ToU is in the middle and added link
automatically. I guess there was assumption that a particular word
order - here the coupling noun and adjective - went universally, but
linguistically it isn't. In certain languages it would be "TOU New"
and in the others not.

For Hebrew, even ad hoc, Amir, I wonder if you make the top message
empty and just begin the last one with "new ...". Or you found already
a better solution hopefully.

Even it looks awkward and unsophisticated, for assuring better
internationalization, it would have better to put the whole wikified
message into one sole MediaWiki message, since the grammatical word
order, say, syntax, is widely varied among different natural
languages.
> --
> Amir
>
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-- 
KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
member of Wikimedians in Kansai  / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp