myWeather translation and more

Hi. I have already written elsewhere on the forum that weather plugin did not translate cleanly (in French for my part). I have looked at an -weeks old- source file in the weather plugin, and saw places where the author was fed up with localizing stuff... I can understand
Example of lazyness consequences : "Wind: From WSW at X mp/h" currently translates to "Vent : de WSW à X km/h" (WSW should read OSO)

This can be corrected allright. But there is more, thanks to french's twisted grammary. Currently I can read : "AM Averses" for London, and "Dispersé Orages" for Tampa, FL (weather is shitty in Paris as well..) which are supposed to translate somthing like "AM Showers" and "Scattered T-Storms".
Point is, in French I would rather read "Averses AM" and "Orages DisperséS".

I guess many languages will have issues like this, not to mention this guy I read from in the forum who wants to localise MP to chinese or so (RTL languages...). I am under the impression that the weather plugin, lazyness apart, can never fully translate to foreign languages as it is now.

I would like to ask your comments on the consequences : should the translators provide plugins and skins ? Is there a way to partially override plugins processing ? Could that be generic ?

For your information, there is another issue w/ the french localisation I know of : access to IMDB could/should be replaced w/ access to allocine.com (french internet site) in order to get the same kind of movie info, but written in french...

Sorry for the long post. I hope I was clear. Thanks for your responses.

[Schrauber]

The weather module does the translation word by word. And this is exacly the problem. The word order will be the same. And so, in some languages, the words are not in correct order.

But I have no idea how to do this. I see no chance to do this with the language files. Only way to implement this, is to implement some sourcecode for every language with this problem. But this runs out of the idea, to do localisation with language files.

A way would be, to translate not the single words, but complete phrases. So, to take "AM Showers" not as "AM" and "Showers", but as the complete sting. But this will increase the amount of phases to translate. And I dont know all the phrases, we can get.

[McMorning]

Hi Schrauber,

i never programmed in C# or worked with XML files, so i don't know who helpful my suggestions would be, but give me a try.

First i don't know how you generate the XML file with the actual weather data. If this will be generated by you it would be quite simple, but if you get the whole file in this format from weather.com you should try to alter the entries.
(Actually i don't have a file where i can copy from, so maybe my 'Code' would be fully correct, but it should clear out what i mean)

<Weather>
   <Date>04/11/09</Date>
</Weather>

should be break down to:

<Weather>
   <Date>
      <Year>04</Year>
      <Month>11</Month>
      <Day>09</Day>
   </Date>
</Weather>

Also those things should be done with alle words which will be in the XML file (like the AM Averses proplem showed by epoch1970).
In that case you'll get a property for every word in the Weather statement. At second you'll need a 'Translation' XML file which should something like this:

<Translation>
   <German>
      <Dictionary>
         <Fog>Nebel</Fog>
         <Sunny>Heiter</Sunny>
         <Rain>Regen</Rain>
         ... or if words to difficult :)...
         <1>Bewölkt</1>
         <2>Glatteis</2>
         <3>Stürmisch</3>
      </Dictionary>
</Translation>

At last there would be a second section in this XML file (or a second XML file???) which holds the format for the whole phrase like this

   <German>
      <Format>
         <Date>Day.Month.Year</Date>
      </Format>
   </German>

Hopefully you understand what my intention was. The idea just tries to combine a word-by-word translation and a second section which tells you in which order the words have to be shown up. Also you would get a stable code and everyone out there can make a translation for his own language without your intervention.

Best regards,
McMorning