[desktop entry spec] new FullName key

[Christian Rose]

On 8/3/09, Shaun McCance <shaunm at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 09:41 +0300, John Tapsell wrote:
>  > > Not sure what you mean with 'supporting GenericName', but the current
>  > > GNOME HIG recommendations are the way they are precisely because of the
>  > > translatability concerns of combining Name and GenericName
>  > > programatically.
>  >
>  > Could someone give an example where programmatically combining would
>  > fail, if the combining was done as  i18n("%1 %2")  or even i18n("%1 -
>  > %2")  ?
>
> In languages that have case declensions, "%1 %2" and "%1 - %2"
>  could involve the GenericName being written differently.  So
>  you might write "Epiphany - Web Browser", but "Epiphany Webo
>  Browsero".  (Completely made up example, of course.)
>
>  You can't reliably translate GenericName to fit into one or
>  the other, because different implementations might decide to
>  display things differently.

Another example would be Scandinavian languages like e.g. Swedish,
where the definitive article is a suffix of the noun, and if and when
you use a name to distinguish the noun, i.e. you refer to a specific
instance of the noun, you have to use the definitive article. Doing
otherwise would be incorrect.

Examples:

"Web Browser" (as in any web browser) == "Webbläsare"

"Epiphany Web Browser" (as in *the* Epiphany web browser, not just any
web browser) => "Webbläsaren Epiphany" (== "The Epiphany Web Browser")

Just writing "Webbläsare Epiphany", i.e. the literal equivalent of
"Epiphany Web Browser", would look extremely odd and incorrect in
Swedish. The definitive article (suffix) needs to be there in Swedish
if the name is there and we thus refer to a specific application.

So, as always with localization, you just can't concatenate sentences
or pieces of sentences and get a result. It has to be translated as a
whole.


Christian