[mb-i18n] Internationalization for lists

[Alexander Dupuy]

Oliver Charles asked:
> Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
> handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
> write, for example:
>
> Foo
> Foo & Bar
> Foo, Bar & Baz
>
> With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
> last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
> construct looks in other languages.
>
> It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
> relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
> solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.

Nobody has mentioned the East Asian languages, I don't have any special 
experience with these, but Wikipedia provides some relevant information 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation):

Enumeration comma ( ? )
    The enumeration comma, known as the "pause mark" in Chinese 
(simplified Chinese: ??; traditional Chinese: ??; pinyin: dùnhào; 
literally "pause mark"), must be used instead of the regular comma when 
separating words constituting a list. Chinese language does not observe 
the English custom of serial comma (extra comma before "and" or "or" in 
a list), although the issue is of little in Chinese at any rate, as the 
English "A, B, and C" is more likely to be rendered in Chinese as "A? B 
? C", without using a conjunction such as ? or ?.

Japanese apparently follows this style as well, whereas Korean uses more 
Western punctuation forms.

Worth noting for all of these East Asian languages is that the fullspace 
comma does not need space character between it and following list item.

So, you could probably do fine with just three i18n terms:

1) ' and '
2) ', '
3) ', and '

although in theory, if you wanted to support a localization that 
required punctuation around each item (e.g. a Lisp-like syntax that uses 
parentheses like ((a) (b) (c)) for lists of items), you could add two 
more terms for start-of-list and end-of-list (which in English would be 
empty strings, although end-of-list could be a period).

Sample localizations of these terms might look something like the 
following table, showing space characters as ? for clarity (it might 
well be worth making these a personal preference, since users in any 
locale might well prefer different variants, for example "and" vs. "&"):

Name
	en_US
	en_UK
	es       
	zh      
	lisp    
conjunction
	?&? 	?and? 	?y? 	? 	) (
list-comma
	,? 	,? 	,? 	?
	) (
final-comma
	,?&? 	,? 	,? 	? 	) (
list-start
	
	
	
	
	((
list-end
	
	.
	.
	
	))


@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com


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