bugmake - Bugs: bug #42958, Hebrew translation is in visual...

 
 

bug #42958: Hebrew translation is in visual order

Submitter:  None
Submitted:  Sun 10 Aug 2014 05:54:09 AM UTC
   
 
Severity:  3 - Normal Item Group:  Bug
Status:  Not A Bug Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Open/Closed:  Closed
Component Version:  4.0 Operating System:  None
Fixed Release:  None Triage Status:  None
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Sun 10 Aug 2014 02:19:53 PM UTC, comment #2: 

I'm the Hebrew team leader for the Translation Project.

The visual order of the Hebrew translation was a conscious choice of mine, as I estimated then that the probability of Make running on a text terminal that supports bidirectional reordering is quite slim, especially if the system in question is not in a country where a BIDI locale is the default.

I'm not sure this has changed today; I'd need to see some real-life statistics to reconsider.

Please note that what's important here is the availability of BIDI-supporting text terminal, since Make is a console program.  We need a level of BIDI support that includes bidirectional control characters, which, as you correctly point out, are needed to prevent jumbled display.  At least some terminal emulators I know of that support BIDI don't fully support the directional controls.

As for difficulties in editing, don't worry about that (unless you plan on joining the translation team): I have a simple Emacs function to convert between logical and visual order, and I used it when I worked on the translation.

Eli Zaretskii <eliz>
Group Member
Sun 10 Aug 2014 10:29:52 AM UTC, comment #1: 

GNU make relies on the Translation Project to provide its translations: http://translationproject.org/domain/make.html ; it doesn't create any translations itself.  If you want to discuss a specific translation, such as Hebrew, please contact the translation team: http://translationproject.org/team/he.html

If there are specific instances of i18n support in the GNU make codebase which make the proper translation impossible or difficult they can contact the GNU make developers to discuss it.

Paul D. Smith <psmith>
Group administrator
Sun 10 Aug 2014 05:54:09 AM UTC, original submission:  

BiDi languages are typically stored in one of two character orders in memory. Either "logical", which means that the characters are stored in the same order they are written/pronounced, or "visual", which means that the characters are stored in the order you'd expect to find them, usually when reading them from left to right.

The former means that the characters need to be reordered before they can be shown to the end user. The later ordering was, typically, used when the display (terminal emulator, whatever) would not perform any BiDi reordering.

The world is unanimously shifting toward logical ordering, as all modern display are capable of BiDi reordering, and logical ordering is much simpler to edit, sort, search and maintain. In fact, it might be argued that visual order text is not the preferred source form.

The question of BiDi display of console applications is an open one, with no clear conclusions. Unlike in the GUI case, in text display the display engine doesn't know when one field ends and another starts, which results in reordering spill overs (where fields change place).

Despite this, most modern terminal emulators perform BiDi reordering. Make should either drop translations to BiDi languages, or display text in logical order. Field reordering spills can be handled by the translators using BiDi control characters.

Anonymous

 

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    Follow 3 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2014-08-10 psmith StatusNone Not A Bug
        Open/ClosedOpen Closed
    2014-08-10 shachar Carbon-Copy- Added shachar

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