[bug-gettext] [bug #52971] document the approach w.r.t. date/time format strings

[Bruno Haible]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52971>

                 Summary: document the approach w.r.t. date/time format
strings
                 Project: GNU gettext
            Submitted by: haible
            Submitted on: Thu 25 Jan 2018 08:50:36 AM CET
                Category: C
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: None
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

Date/time format strings (argument to strftime) need to be localized by
translators. Explain the general approach and the specific handling of %B vs.
%OB, %b vs. %ob.

Rafal Luzynski writes:
"I strongly believe that the format strings should be left for the translators
and the programmer's choice of a format string should be correct for English
but this is seldom correct for other languages. This is not because of the
genitive/nominative month names but for the reasons like:

- English often uses the month-day order, most of other languages   use the
day-month order;
- many languages require a dot after the day number;
- English requires a comma after the day number if it is followed by a year
number;
- some languages (e.g., East Asian) do not have month names and use the month
numbers instead;
- and many more...

...

The reasons above are sufficient to tell that the translators must have dealt
with it since forever. If you are asking whether the rules where to use %OB
and where %B are universal (so the translators will not have to decide) or not
(different in different languages) I must say that I strongly doubt about how
these rules work in Czech, Serbian, and Slovak language. But let's take a look
at these numbers (they may be inaccurate, take them as an approximation):

- there are about 200 languages supported by glibc;
- about 20 of them (10%) need the nominative/genitive distinction, in the rest
of the languages there is no difference between %OB and %B;
- about 3 of those 20 (1.5% of the total number) the rules of %OB/%B may be
different."





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