Hi Johannes,
Thank you for translating!
Isn’t it possible to omit articles in some form, like this: %s SEO-Einstellungen?
I translated the plugin into Dutch and faced the same “die” (der) and “dat” (das) issues. If you hit the “Other Languages” tab under the translation entry, you can find my Dutch translations, where I took liberties reconstructing sentences to avoid articles. Maybe those can aid you 🙂
This article exception isn’t listed, but it’s still good to keep handy: https://de.wordpress.org/mitwirken/style-guide-fuer-uebersetzungen/.
unfortunately this is also not 100% correct.
It should be “Seiten-SEO-Einstellungen”, “Beitrags-SEO-Einstellungen” (missing letter highlighted)
We cannot programmatically determine which article should be used, for there are no linguistic rules determining the gender of a noun (other than learning them by heart). Since any post type can be used (think of Products for WooCommerce, or Events for calendar software), this must remain a placeholder. Of course, we could plainly make it “SEO-Einstellungen,” but that’s boring.
For Finish, the translators used SEO-asetukset (%s) (i.e., SEO-Einstellungen (%s)). I’m not a fan of this.
The Swedish translators used SEO-inställningar för %s (i.e., SEO-Einstellungen für %s). I think that would be the best one: simply omitting the article. Post, Page, Product, and many others are names for the post types, after all.
Unfortunately this is not grammatically correct either. I’m sorry.
I don’t think this only affects the german language.
How about some logic, so we cover the standard WordPress post types and each individual post type will get the placeholder? That way most of your users will get a 100% correct translation.
Hi Johannes,
I either do it right for everything and everyone or not do it at all.
Have you considered that Seite, Produkt, and Beitrag are proper nouns (names) instead of common nouns (objects)? Like this: “SEO-Einstellungen für Sybre” — is that grammatically correct? If so, we could consider %s a proper noun and have it be a little quirky.
Still, I believe you can omit articles for common nouns in titles/names/buttons regardless, as is the case in most Western Germanic languages (including Dutch and English) — the string in question is a title of a meta box. It might not look right or form a perfect sentence, but it’s better than listing all possible articles.
If you are confident it isn’t possible to work around this issue, I’ll have to remove the placeholder so that it becomes simply “SEO-Einstellungen” and “Startseiten-SEO-Einstellungen”. No harm done, and it might even work better on smaller screens.
I’m going to remove the %s in the next update — it’ll just be “SEO Settings”. This will also help us migrate TSF into Gutenberg’s ridiculously tiny sidebar.
