Maybe my question about how this will get handled in smaller languages
didn't get through so I'll just chip in my thoughts.
The two main issues I can see are not around translation but
a) languages with more morphology than English or Spanish (which is why
I think that's a really poor pair, from an l10n angle, even something
Slavonic would have been better)
b) How Vaani is supposed to tie into l10n in general
Regarding a), many languages will add things to a name, at the front or
end, in sentences like "Call Jack" which might become "Call
Jack[inflection]" or "Call J[inflection]ack" or some such. /Is <name>
your <relationship>/ will potentially come out as utter garbage in many
languages unless this is handled really carefully and will most likely
need l20n. To begin with, this question cannot be answered with the same
echo verb (see the yes/no point below) as most other questions I see in
the pdf. It most certainly needs 'Se and Chan e whereas most other OS
phrases are tortured into working with Tha/Chan eil. Secondly, referring
to family members often involves complex grammar and in many languages
will not work with a simple daisychain model. For example in
Irish/Welsh/Gaelic, the use of possessives triggers something called
lenition (change of the first sound of a following word). So whereas
"mother" is /màthair/ your mother is /do mhàthair/ (note the h):
/An i Màiri do mhàthair?/
[be? she Mary your mother]
However, "your husband" your invoke a pattern of alienable possession
using "an" (the) and "aig" (at) i.e.
/An e Seumas an duine agad//
//[/be? he James the man atyou]
For sure not all languages will be this much of a headache but many will
b a lot more complex than English or Spanish, neither of which have much
noun morphology, plurals aside.
The <nth> one
is also a tricky one, reference to 3rd person objects will invoke
reference to grammatical gender in many languages. So if a users thinks
of "one" being the phone number, this would be feminine and come out as
/An dàrna tè/
[the second femaleone]
But if they think of it one being "option/choice" it may equally be
/An dàrna fear/
[the second maleone]
Yes/No... I think we were promised some more l10n sensitive approaches
in OS regarding languages which have no two word Yes/No pair but I
haven't seen much of it. This will be tricky for many languages. For
example, "Do you want to call Jack" would probably call for /Tha/ or
/Chan eil/ but "Is this the song you wanted" would most likely need /'S
e/ or /Chan e/ - and since some of these refer to people, it would also
require a split betwenn /'S e/ (be he) and /'S i/ (be she).
I think for proof of concept, a pre-alpha or anything like that, you
should *really* pick the nastiest language (from a linguistic angle)
which is highly active in OS l10n. Irish or Welsh would be good
candidates, but even Czeck, Hungarian or Finnish would be more helpful
for long term sustainability.
Regarding b) ... A lot of the locales I see in OS don't have voice
recognition. Is this a trainable engine which the user can 'teach' to
recognize their own language (which would be real cool if set up right)
or is this a 'big languages' only toy?
Michael
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