Fri, 18 Feb 2005

Fun with gettext

I started working on the german centericq because the former maintainer doesn't seem to be interested anymore, no changes since 2001 and his mailaddress bounces. While doing my business in the file I stumbled upon the following interesting thing that gettext offered me:

#, fuzzy
msgid "Failed"
msgstr "Weiblich"

While it might be funny (even for people who claim to be non-sexistic) to see that gettext thinks female is a synonym for failed, it shows in a quite nice way how the gettext fuzzy algorithm works: it tries to get a best match which is similar. And although female and failed share some letters in the same order (namely, fale) it still works out nice quite often.

You see, working on translations can be fun too, sometimes. So I encourage everyone to pick up some po files from their favorite applications and enhance them, support your fellow native speakers! Give back for what you get.

/debian | permanent link | Comments: 0

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