TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2003-05 > 1051972189


From: Terry Reigel <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Language strategies
Date: Sat, 3 May 2003 10:29:49 -0400
In-Reply-To: <1C494577A9B7364EB5A4F88C962156D268CB28@mail32gent1.corp.u4agr.com>


On Sat, 3 May 2003 14:27:10 +0200, Michel Vuijlsteke wrote:

>Is there an accepted TMG strategy for handling multiple
>languages in your data?

Michel,

I doubt there is anything "accepted" but perhaps some of our
multi-lingual users can offer some suggestions. But maybe I can offer
some ideas for you to consider.

>Probably about 75% of data I have between 1750 and about
>1900 is in French, with things before or since then are
>about evenly split between Dutch, English and French.
>
>This makes for very awkward reports, things like "He was
>voltigeur au premier bataillon die 45ieme regiment
>d'infanterie de ligne" or "She died na eene kortstondige
>duizeligheid", which respectively indicate he was a kind
>of scout in the Napoleonic army and she died after a short
>spell of dizziness.
>
>Is it the accepted practice to translate all these little
>phrases? Should I then add the original in parentheses? Or
>leave that for a footnote?

I think as Karla suggests, it depends on what you want, and who your
readers are and what they want. But mixing languages within a
sentence is obviously awkward. There are a couple of possible
solutions. If you want all your reports in one language, you can use
Sentence Structures in that language and translate all the notes into
it, placing them in the Memos. Then the question is, what do you want
to do with the original text? Possibilities include 1) leaving it in
the memos, perhaps in parenthesis, 2) leaving it in the memo, but
apply exclusion brackets so it won't print, and 3) moving it to the
CD so it will print in source notes.

If you want to be able to print reports in more than one language,
you can use segmented Memos, and have the translations for each
language in a separate segment of the memo. Then, arrange the
Sentence Structures for each language to call the appropriate Memo
segment. This will solve the problem for the Memo Field, but the
place fields are more difficult. I've not tried that, but if you want
different spelling of place names based on language used, I would
think you would have to place the different spellings in various
place elements and call them specifically in the sentence structures
- sounds messy.

>Am I correct in fearing I'm never going to be able to have
>good reports in more than one language? As far as I can
>see, getting a report to look even halfway decent involves
>a *lot* of tweaking sentences, creating short phrases in
>memos that don't always mean somehting without the
>sentence structure there, creating custom sentence
>structures for certain individuals, etc.

Yes. That's actually true even using just English. Getting "good"
narratives directly out of the genealogy program requires a fair
amount of "editing" of tags, sentences, and phrases, and some
rearrangements of tags by changing sort dates. I suspect it's just as
true, perhaps more so, when you try to output in more than one
language.

>As I'm probably most fluent in Dutch I've decided to have
>a go at fleshing out the Dutch TMG sentence structures
>(there's not much there!), but I very quickly ran into
>problems I'm not sure how to fix--not necessarily because
>it's Dutch, but certainly exacerbated by it.
>
>Take the Address tag. How do you deal with the
>prepositions for these three tags? They are for one and
>the same individual, and i'd like to see them in one and
>the same report, so the at/in-switch on the report option
>/ places tab is no use to me:

In cases were the automatic prepositions don't work, you can either
turn them off and add them to the Sentence Structures, or add them to
the place field. If they mostly work for you, but don't in a few
cases, then edit the Sentence Structures for those tags. Change <[L]>
to <near [L]> for example. If you just want it not to appear, put a
space in front the variable, like this: < [L]> -- that will keep the
automatic preposition you select in the report definition from
appearing in this tag.

>In Dutch it's even worse, because to get somewhat readable
>sentences you have to add articles, as in:
>
>* Hij woonde op het Dorsplein (he lived on town square,
>Dutch needs "on *the* town square") * Hij studeerde
>wetenschappen op het Sint-Barbaracollege (he studied
>science at CollegeName, Dutch needs "at *the* CollegeName)
>* Hij studeerde rechten aan de Rijksuniversiteit (he
>studied law at UniversityName, Dutch needs "studied law at
>*the* UniversityName", also remark that it's not the same
>article: DE as opposed to HET)
>
>It doesn't make sense to have all these addresses start
>with articles, and except for manually tweaking every
>single person in a 10.000 person database I don't see any
>solution to the problem...

Can you add the articles to the Dutch sentence structures? Something
like <aan de [L]> (I don't know Dutch, so I'm guessing at the proper
construction from your example). That way you wouldn't have to change
each place field, and you could report in other languages without
getting the Dutch articles.

Terry Reigel



This thread: