[libreoffice-l10n] Feedback and suggestions on the l10n process

My apologies if this is stuff that has been brought up before but I've 
only been active since about 2009 (originally on OO). But there are some 
aspects of the process which I'd like to bring up for potential 
discussion to make LO better from various points of view.

1) yes/no
There is no coherent approach to questions and answers, some are clearly 
paired, some rely on the strings for yes/no in some other place. I would 
personally like to see yes/no questions handled like plurals (see below 
though). There are two main reasons, both related to the fact that in a 
large number of languages, a bipolar yes/no pair does not exists.
- it creates weird phrases
- it creates phrases which are much longer

Let me use Gaelic as an example. Gaelic (as does Irish, Welsh, Chinese 
etc) has no single words for yes and no. Instead, the verb is repeated, 
if necessary with a negative. For example "Open the %s" which can be 
handled via a yes/no offering, in idiomatic Gaelic becomes
Am fosglar %s?
Fosglar (will open)
Chan fhosglar (will not open)

So there are as many "words" for yes and no as there are verbs. The 
workaround is currently to phrase all questions that they can be 
answered with the tha (be)/chan eil (not be) pair. The problem is, that 
turns the above into:
A bheil thu airson %s fhosladh (are you for opening %s)
Tha/Chan eil

2) Accelerators
Could these *please* be automated by some dandy piece of script rather 
than the translator spending hours trying to make sure they don't 
overlap, then watching them overlap and spending even more time finding 
the right one and changing it? Surely this can be automated.

3) Plurals
Implementation of plurals seems to be ... random. Many strings in theory 
would work much better if they were just put up for translation with 
plural formatting. "Simple plurals" are an even worse headache.

4) Line breaks
As with the accelerators, can't these be automated? How am I supposed to 
know where to break a line, I don't know how much space there is, if the 
window automatically flexes etc etc. As i see it \n does not belong in 
the translation part of l10n.

Thoughts?

Cheers

Michael

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