Improve translation handling for languages with complex grammar/word order (feedback from Estonian translation)

[aleiepure]

This issue is based on feedback from Priit Jõerüüt working on the Estonian translation in Weblate. Since Weblate’s comment box is too short for deeper discussion, I’m moving the full context here.

Original comment

Languages have very different word orders and use different language constructs (e.g. > declension instead of prepositions) and different approaches to singular/plural (e.g. > one|some|many).

This means, that best translations will be achieved when:

1. visual sentences are not made of many translation strings, joined in code, but one > translation string for one sentence with variables is used (this allows to change word order and find ways to handle cases)
2. in these difficult sentences translation strings are not reused, but each one has its own (this is also avoided if p 1. is in use)
3. languages with complex approach to singular/plural would probably prefer to avoid "hour(s)"-style of translation and have full use of grammatical number as supported in Weblate

From the current approach of splitting everything, for example Estonian translation is quite unnatural. The UI uses a lot of selectboxes here and I do not know if source code language and Weblate can handle variables

[aleiepure]

Hi and thank you for your time to translate the app into Estonian.

Regarding your comment, I agree completely. While designing the UI I wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible for someone who doesn’t know how CRON works. To achieve that, I introduced widgets inside of sentences, which unfortunately made the strings fragmented and less natural for translation. The reason I initially went with this approach is that it was the easiest and most immediate way to get something working. I fully understand that English word order cannot be applied universally and that languages like Estonian (and many others) require more flexibility in structure, cases, and grammatical number.

The code can work with translatable variables, but these variables need to be plain strings in order to be recognized and translated properly. They cannot be interactive widgets (like dropdowns or input boxes), which is where the current limitation comes from.

I’m definitely open to improving this. If you have ideas, even simple mockups (paper and pencil sketches are fine) could help a lot to see how things might be structured better for your/any language.