Re: Request for a new feature

[Bruno Haible]

Hello,

David Philippi wrote:
> was it already discussed to enhance gettext with gender support?

Thanks for asking. The question has come up once or twice. Nothing is planned
for GNU gettext on this topic. The Mozilla localization team is starting a
system that has features in this direction; but I'm not optimistic such a
support can be realized without pushing tasks onto the translators that
most translators cannot do. Anyway, we'll see how the Mozilla's team
system will work...

> Currently one 
> can abstract away plural rules but the same doesn't hold true for gender. 

This is because for plural forms, the integer n is given by the maintainer,
and the plural formula is the same for all translations into a particular
language. This is not the case for the gender.

> This might not pose a problem for usual applications but in the context of a 
> game it does become one.
> I'd like to know wheter there's hope to see such support in gettext in new 
> version so we could get rid of hacks to add support for it in The Battle for 
> Wesnoth which has the problem already.

No such support is planned for the mid-term future. The best recommendation
we can give - if the gender is a person's gender, i.e. only (m) or (f), -
is to let the translator translate two similar but complete strings, together
with a translator comment on each. For example:

    const char *lost_message =
      (male
       ? /* TRANSLATORS: The argument is the proper name of a male player. */
         pgettext ("male", "%s has lost.")
       : /* TRANSLATORS: The argument is the proper name of a female player. */
         pgettext ("female", "%s has lost."));

('pgettext' has been added in gettext-0.15.)

Bruno