Question Towards better software i18n and L10n

The current Joomla! (and Kunena) way of handling i18n and L10n in PHP is really not up to the challenge of reaching users all over the globe.

For example, things like

are maybe a nice hack for English and perhaps a small number of other western languages, but simply don't work for the majority of others [1].

There are countless of other examples where gender, number, declensions, word order, etc. play a significant role and where simple string substitution and concatenation that works for English just fails for other languages.

I would therefore strongly urge you to consider switching over to gettext based i18n for your future development efforts. It will make i18n handling and maintenance much easier because of a well established framework with a plethora of available tools, and translators will be grateful as well since support for their languages will improve, it will be easier to track and merge changes, there are GUI editors, online collaboration systems, and much more.

Please add your support to

joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/tracker...racker_item_id=12089

so Joomla! and all other associated components can really go global

[1] www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/gettext/Plural-forms.html

Personally I would love to see this, as would allow for easy gender strings, and so, but I doubt we can see this until joomla itself uses it...

Althought, some extensions like jomsocial already use it...

will see

Why not? I don't like the current solutions, because of I have the same problem with some strings. In Finnish you can usually go around of it by saying it in different order, but..

So add your opinions to the above feature request and let's get the Joomla devs to take notice.

As far as Kunena switching ahead of Joomla as JomSocial does, you'll have to weigh the decision against potentially making integration harder, e.g. the CB plugin might be directly using some language constants from Kunena in the current style?