Ubiquity in Portuguese
Felipe, a Ubiquity user, put together a wonderful look at what Ubiquity might look like in Portuguese. He has some great points here particularly regarding the “map” verb used in English—Felipe points out that Portuguese does not have a very common “map” verb and that it would be much more common to use enter me dê (literally me give) to use a verb to request a map. This is a great example of how Jono’s overlord verbs proposal may be an important aspect of our i18n efforts. The post is also timely as we’ve recently been discussing in our regular meetings (open to all!) that Portuguese may/could be the focus of our next parser construction efforts.
What would the challenges be for Ubiquity in your language? We’d love to see an increasing number of blog posts on this topic in different languages. Thanks Felipe! ^^
Related posts:
- This week on Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation
- Localizing Ubiquity: commands and nountypes
- Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists
- Ubiquity i18n: questions to ask
- Ubiquity Localization: What’s New, What’s Next
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Tags: i18n, l10n, linguistics, Mozilla Planet, parser, Portuguese, ubiquity
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March 6th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Well… first of all, "me dê" would translate literally to "give me", instead of "me give". But there is something worse.
The main point of the post is that the use of the equivalent of the construct "map of San Francisco" would be far better than "map San Francisco". The "give me" prefix would be optional, just like "map San Francisco [for me]".
In addition to this, me and most friends would use: pt: "[Eu quero] mapear São Francisco" en: "[I want] to map San Francisco"
that's not such an esoteric construct her, even though the non-verb construct is common.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
And the other thing is that "me dê" is only used in Brasil. Nobody in Portugal, and I suspect, Angola, Moçambique, Cabo Verde and so on, would find that formulation very intuitive. Disclaimer: I haven't been following the "overlord verbs proposal" discussion, so I may be missing something.