DTD limitations with the gender of translated words

Yesterday, I wrote about the complexity that many localizers face when translating Firefox.

Here is another example.

Difficulty #2: Gender of words

Remember from yesterday that we can have a DTD file in the en-US version of Firefox like

<!ENTITY brandShortName “Firefox”>

where every time the variable “brandShortName” appears in the code, Firefox displays the translated string that is shown in quotes.

What if a language used a different gender for the same word, causing that word to slightly change given different contexts in the user interface? Let’s look at this example, using Polish again as our language of translation:

<!ENTITY willCheck “&brandShortName will check links”>

In Polish, the localizer has to translate the entity into the following:

<!ENTITY willCheck “&brandShortName będzie sprawdzał(a) odnośniki“>

where sprawdzał is the masculine version of the word and sprawdzała is the feminine version of the word.  See how that can be problematic?  This isn’t how Poles speak or write naturally, using a parenthetical “a” to account for all possible genders in one sentence.  In context, the proper gender version should be used.  But, the localizer has to acknowledge both endings with the (a).  Alternatively, the localizer could pretend that the word is simply masculine gender, which can be obviously sensitive depending on what word is being written, who is reading it, and what alternate meaning that word might take on with the wrong ending.  Polish locaizers made this change and it’s serviceable.

As we expand into new areas, where languages can be extremely different from English, we’ll need to think about a better way to do this.  In the next post, one more example and then some more on localization.  I’ll conclude all this with a possible solution.

(By the way, I don’t speak Polish.  I just happen to work next to a Polish guy every day.  Thanks, Gandalf, for providing me some examples to round out these posts.)