GenoPro Home
GenoPro Home  |  Get Started With My Genealogy Tree  |  Buy  |  Login  |  Privacy  |  Search  |  Site Map
 
Translation of narrative phrases using pattern matching


https://support.genopro.com/Topic7999.aspx
Print Topic | Close Window

By Anna - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
I found the newest generator easy to work with and have a skin in Swedish ALMOST ready to go.

Q: Where do I find (and edit) the texts (individuals/families) that appear after the counters of names in the index?

Anna

By GenoProSupport - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Anna (8/31/2005)
Q: Where do I find (and edit) the texts (individuals/families) that appear after the counters of names in the index?

The report generator uses the method Dic.PlurialCount("Individual", cIndividuals) or Dic.PlurialCount("Family", cFamilies).  You need to translate the following tags in Dictionary.xml.  Use the attribute P= for the plurial form if different from the default plurial.

 <Picture T="Picture"/>
 <Family T="Family" P="Families"/>
 <Individual T="Individual"/>

By Anna - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Thank you for the prompt reply, and: Sorry, shouldn't have missed it.Blush

OK, now the Swedish skin works. I've inserted plurals for sons, daughters, siblings etc in the dict, and added the swedish possessive forms for nouns in lang.

Q:The phrase during (period) a's occupation was... did not work out in swedish. I wish to rearrange the order of the terms, resulting in: A worked as ..... during...

So, how do I change the format from the basik form A to the possessive form A's? I've searched for the string "PhOccupation in lang to find where tio make the substiute, but is is not in that file?

By GenoProSupport - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Anna
how do I change the format from the basik form A to the possessive form A's? I've searched for the string "PhOccupation" but is is not in that file?

The phrase PhOccupation is found in file individual.htm.  If you want to remove the possessive form, replace the line strRelative = StrPossessiveProperNoun(i.Name.Short) by strRelative = i.Name.Short.

In the future, I am planning to improve the phrase generator to have a built-in possessive set of rules and a new tag syntax such as:

Report.WritePhrase "{p0,1}", "Dan", "car"

Such a phrase would produce the following output: "Dan's car".  In French, the code Report.WritePhrase "{p0,1}", "Dan", "auto" would produce "L'auto de Dan".

Using this new improvement, removing the possessive form would be as simple as changing {p0,1} to {0,1}.  I think this will simplify the translation - as there would be no need to modify the VBScript code.

By Yehudad - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
GenoProSupport
In the future, I am planning to improve the phrase generator to have a built-in possessive set of rules and a new tag syntax such as:

Report.WritePhrase "{p0,1}", "Dan", "car"

Such a phrase would produce the following output: "Dan's car".  In French, the code Report.WritePhrase "{p0,1}", "Dan", "auto" would produce "L'auto de Dan".

Using this new improvement, removing the possessive form would be as simple as changing {p0,1} to {0,1}.  I think this will simplify the translation - as there would be no need to modify the VBScript code.

What a great idea!!

This way I'm sure there won't be any code changes!

By Rjn - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
First of all I'll thank Dan for pm's and emails. I feel very motivated in translating as well as generally helping to improve the new report generator.

I did some changes to the phrases, too, as the originals weren't very natural translated in Finnish. Especially phrases for Education and Occupation were difficult. In general I had to add additional full stops mostly because of lack of ways to inflect nouns in proper way, for example
"Perttu was born 1-2-2003 in Alavus" had to be divided into two sentences because there was no way to inflect place name Alavus -> Alavudella, and I had to go around the problem by saying "Perttu was born 1-2-2003. Birth place was Alavus." so that I didn't need to inflect it.

I have discussed with Dan by email about some grammatical issues that are necessary especially for languages not so closely related to English.
For example in Finnish there are several (14) *cases* how a noun is inflected in different situations.
Let's pick a noun like hat - hattu. Different *cases*: hattu, hatun, hatussa, hatusta, hattuun, hatulla, hatulta, hatulle, hatuksi, hattuna, hatutta, hattua... (I can't even remember all of them).
Most of them are not necessary in report generator but the nominative (hattu), genetive (hatun), and partitive (hattua) are the most important.
The rest are essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, komitative, and instruktive. (Don't ask me which is which, I don't remember BigGrinSmile

Personal Pronouns and their inflection in various cases would be needed, too.
By GenoProSupport - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Rjn
For example in Finnish there are several (14) *cases* how a noun is inflected in different situations.
Let's pick a noun like hat - hattu. Different *cases*: hattu, hatun, hatussa, hatusta, hattuun, hatulla, hatulta, hatulle, hatuksi, hattuna, hatutta, hattua...

A section describing the rules for possessive names would be a good solution.  In that section, you could write 14 rules for each of the 14 cases.

The question remains... What are the criterias for the rules?

EndWith - The noun ends with a given string.
Pattern - The noun matches the pattern.  For performance reasons, the pattern won't be a regular expression, but simple wildcards such as * and ?.  For instance, any noun starting with the letter "A" would have the pattern "A*" or any noun ending with "s" could have the pattern "*s".
EqualTo - The noun matches exactly the given string.  This would be good for a very specific exception.

Operations:
ReplaceWith - Replace the noun with a given string.
Append - Append a string to a given noun.

Anything else missing?

By Rjn - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Sounds good.
EndWith is definitely a must and the other criterias might be handy, too. I'll try to think of any situation that could require more.

(I'm sorry it may take quite a long time for me to react to anything this week because I'm at my parent's place running Win98 @ 200 MHz Pentium with 33k modem Smile ... I'll be better available next week)
By GenoProSupport - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
EndWith is definitely a must and the other criterias might be handy, too.

Technically, every rule could be described using the Pattern attribute, however it is simpler to read EndWith (or perhaps EndsWith) than reading a pattern with wildcards (* and ?).  Besides, a pattern requires more CPU processing (ie, slower) than a straight comparison.

Enjoy your time with your family... there is no rush.  I have plenty of work on my plate so this will give me a little break.  Besides, I need time to digest this information and think of how to implement the rules.

By maru-san - Friday, September 2, 2005
So far I have overcome the tranlation of "the" into German writing "der/die/das" or similar. Would it be possible to have like "P" for plural also "m" for male, "f" for female and "n" for neutral, selected in the dialog box for places.
Another one:
in english you say: she had.. or they had...,
in german it would be: sie hatte.... or sie hatten....

On the family page it says in english: They had one son, but in german it says Sie hatte einen Sohn, but it should be "Sie hatten einen Sohn"
By GenoProSupport - Friday, September 2, 2005
You are right, I need to include the gender (male or female).  We have the same problem in French.  My idea is to have a third [optional] parameter representing the gender male, female, or blank.  This method will be smart enough that if you pass an individual instead of "M" or "F", it will work too.
By rboshuis - Friday, October 21, 2005
When looking at the current dictionary, I see that there are already some big issues with it, which needs to be resolved quickly before it gets out of hand...

There is an inconsistency in using the singular/plural form. i.o.w. sometimes two different entries in the dictionary are used, for example:

    <Is T="is"/>
    <Was T="was"/>
    <Are T="are"/>
    <Were T="were"/>
    <Has T="has"/>
    <Had T="had" />
    <Have T="have"/>

Whereas on the other hand plural forms are sometimes handled within the same element, for example,

<SiblingHalf_ T="half-sibling of unknown gender" P="half-siblings of unknown gender" C1="a half-sibling of unknown gender" />

It would be good to see if we can use a single way in order to express singular and plural forms.

I needed to have both the singular as well as plural versions of <had>, I tried changing this to

<had T="had" P="hadden" />

which didn't work since the code in Lang.vbs was not written to handle plural forms of the dictionary.

rgds,

Ronald
 

By GenoProSupport - Saturday, October 22, 2005
rboshuis (10/22/2005)
I needed to have both the singular as well as plural versions of <had>, I tried changing this to

<had T="had" P="hadden" />

This is an excellent suggestion.  Can you tell me a bit more how you need the plurial version of <had>?  Technically, you can use the LanguageDictionary.Plurial("had", 2) which will return "hadden".

By rboshuis - Saturday, October 22, 2005
Dan,

I don't think it has anything to do with Genopro. It has everything to do with everyone taking the time to properly use the Plural and other forms (C1 etc) of the dictionary. I ABSOLUTELY do not want to blame Ron, and probably he made the code I am referring to, way before the plural forms in the dictionary were invented, but the code should really not be using separate XML elements for singular and plural forms.

It might be good to write some 'report writing guidelines' so that those who stick to that, write reports that are easily translated.

I changed the lang.vbs code for writeHtmlFamily and now it works.

My $ 0.02

Ronald

PS. Of course, a more extended version of the dictionary would allow for the He,She,It,They and for all of those the Present and Past tense of a noun...all in a single XML element (with of course different attributes). THat would also handle some of the female and male issues I saw somewhere...

By GenoProSupport - Saturday, October 22, 2005
rboshuis (10/22/2005)
a more extended version of the dictionary would allow for the He,She,It,They and for all of those the Present and Past tense of a noun...all in a single XML element (with of course different attributes). That would also handle some of the female and male issues I saw somewhere...

I agree.  The personal pronouns (he, she, it, they) should have their own section and have attributes for the past and present tense, as well as the plurial forms.

By erodriguezsaa - Tuesday, March 7, 2006
I have another suggestion when referring to verbs. In spanish, and I think also in other languages, the english verb "to be" is translated with two different spanish verbs "ser" or "estar".

One of them would be needed in some phrases, for example "john and mary are married" would be in spanish "john y mary están casados" (verb "estar"), and the other in some other phrases, for example the phrase "His grandparents are ...", should be in spanish "sus abuelos son ..." (verb "ser").

I think this may be handled with the C1 forms, but I'm not sure how to handle this inside the code. My knowledge of VB is quite limited, but I hope to learn more.

By maru-san - Saturday, July 8, 2006
Have solved some of the grammar issues in german in the following way:

If in the phrase {his/her} is asked for in front of mother or grandparents, then I have put an e behind the brackets like {sein/ihr}e Mutter/Grosseltern. So this can work when the next word is feminin (die Mutter/die Grosseltern). There is no need for the e when the next word is maskulin like father/der Vater.

I did something similar when the bracket is asking for {has/had} and if befor that is "They". In German it will be "hatten" instead of "hatte", so I placed an "n" behind that bracket {has/had}n.
There is another instance where this method is applied. If somebody is the 3rd child of how many children. Children is in German Kinder. But in this sentence you have to place an "n" behind that, like {children)n. This will make the sentence correct.
By haep - Wednesday, March 21, 2007
erodriguezsaa (3/7/2006)
I have another suggestion when referring to verbs. In spanish, and I think also in other languages, the english verb "to be" is translated with two different spanish verbs "ser" or "estar".

One of them would be needed in some phrases, for example "john and mary are married" would be in spanish "john y mary están casados" (verb "estar"), and the other in some other phrases, for example the phrase "His grandparents are ...", should be in spanish "sus abuelos son ..." (verb "ser").

Hi,

I think the solution could be (at least for spanish) create 3 new tags as follows:

    <Is T="es" P="son"/>
    <Was T="fue" P="fueron"/>
    <Are T="son"/>
   
<Are_Alt T="están"/>
    <Were T="fueron"/>
   
<Were_Alt T="estuvieron"/>
    <Has T="tiene"/>
    <Had T="tuvo"/>
   
<Had_Alt T="tuvieron"/>
    <Have T="tienen"/>

Lang.vbs(WriteNarrativeUnionsAndDivorces & WriteHtmlFamily)
Line 223 strToBe = Dic("Were_Alt")
Line 225 strToBe = Dic("Are_Alt")
Line 227 strToBe = strToBe = Dic("Were_Alt")
Line 341 strHaveOrHad1 = Dic(Util.IfElse(Util.GetStatisticsForIndividuals(iParent, spouse) >= 4,"had_Alt","have"))
Line 344 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more children died
Line 357 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died
Line 366 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died

With these changes the problem is solved totally, at least for the Spanish translation, I hope that it could be useful for other languages translations as well.
For those languages that don't need it, the tag and the _Alt tags could be the same

    <Is T="is" P="are"/>
    <Was T="was" P="were"/>
    <Are T="are"/>
    <Are_Alt T="are"/>
    <Were T="were"/>
    <Were_Alt T="were"/>
    <Has T="has"/>
    <Had T="had"/>
    <Had_Alt T="had"/>
    <Have T="have"/>
    <TheyAlso T="they also"/>
    <Also T="also"/>
    <Known T="known"/>

Regards

Hugo

By maru-san - Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Whenever there is a new version with a new skin, I have to open not only the dictionary file, but also the file lang.vbs to make following change in Line 548:
Report.WritePhrase "{ }{\U}{!0}{2h}{!1}.", PnP(i), ToHave(i, coll), StrHtmlCollectionMFU(coll, strDicPrefix, StrHtmlNarrativeNamesShort(coll))

The change is the bracket {!1} behind {2h}, since the verb in Japanese is almost always at the end. Would like to make this change without touching the lang.vbs file.
Another change is required (option) for the Japanese version. A person in an official paper or report is addressed with Full Name (LN+FN), not only by FN. In order to make it correct there should be an option for selection, but still keeping all other related topics correct(possessive proper noun i.e.).
I think others have also touched other files for making their skin work. May be they should come forward and report those changes, since the aim is to have only one(1) skin with several language dictionaries.
By jcguasp - Thursday, May 3, 2007
I also intensively modified Lang.vbs and also some .htm files as "many bits to be translated" were still included into these files.
My French skin was 100% OK some revisions ago. Today, after many gene errors, I gave up correcting. I'm simply waiting for the arrival of the official Genopro French skin. I lately, after the Google map and timeline included facilities, re-published my tree on line but only in English.
To me, the skin translation into other languages is a very hard business. And despite what you call "pattern matching" improvement, I think there will still be some languages not matching!
I'm no linguistic expert but, as today, I do not know any super-program which can translate 2 languages 100%. And I don't think Genopro can do that either (phrase construction and words order, genders, agreement of adjectives with nouns, ...).
To me, English is probably the easiest language in the world (no gender: always a or the, no major change in a verb orthograph, no change at all for an adjective). It is why, I suppose, English is the International language.
So my suggestion to Genopro is:
1) make sure every bit to be translated are all grouped into Dic.xml, i.e. no left over in the other htm and script files, including any Meta data and the Frameset/Safeguard thing.
2) Don't lose too much time over this pattern matching business or on any other fancy improvement features. Remember that people are desperate (I am) to get their skin available (Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Telugu, ...). 1 thing you'll have to implement for sure is a masculin/feminin routine.

Now for the issue of Genopro itself in other languages, people are also desperate to get it/them. If not mistaken, this job should only be a pure simple word translation of the various menus? + Help feature. You'll have to do this facility fairly quickly because, to my opinion, you're loosing a lot of potential Clients at the moment. Unfortunately, this Genopro language version goes along with the corresponding skin version, isn'it.

So Good luck to you. Hariba...

By the way, do Genopro have any timeline for these languages skins? This has already be requested several times.

By jcmorin - Thursday, May 3, 2007
GenoPro is working on the translation of the application itself, and this includes also the translation of the report. I'm sure they will be a couple changes to match non-English language.

GenoPro will probably support English, French, German and Russian while the other languages will supported and maintain by the community.

By genome - Thursday, May 3, 2007
Up until now I have largely concentrated on adding features to the Narrative report rather than addressing translation issues. But some of the issues raised in this thread are easily addressed, whilst others require more effort.
rboshuis
There is an inconsistency in using the singular/plural form. i.o.w. sometimes two different entries in the dictionary are used,
....
It would be good to see if we can use a single way in order to express singular and plural forms.
This requires a a considerable amount of recoding, I'll work on it

Hugo
I think the solution could be (at least for spanish) create 3 new tags as follows:
.....
With these changes the problem is solved totally, at least for the Spanish translation, I hope that it could be useful for other languages translations as well.
I will incorporate Hugo's solution in the next release.

maru-san
Whenever there is a new version with a new skin, I have to open not only the dictionary file, but also the file lang.vbs to make following change in Line 548:
I will add this template to the Dictionary in the next release to avoid the Lang.vbs modification.

maru-san
Another change is required (option) for the Japanese version. A person in an official paper or report is addressed with Full Name (LN+FN), not only by FN. In order to make it correct there should be an option for selection, but still keeping all other related topics correct(possessive proper noun i.e.).
This requires some effort to implement. I'll do my best!
By haep - Friday, May 4, 2007
Ron (5/3/2007)
I will incorporate Hugo's solution in the next release.

Hi Ron,

These are the line numbers in the skin with timeline 2.0.0.4

Lang.vbs

Line 219 strToBe = Dic("Were_Alt")
Line 221 strToBe = Dic("Are_Alt")
Line 223 strToBe = Dic("Were_Alt")
Line 337 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more children died
Line 334 strHaveOrHad1 = Dic(Util.IfElse(Util.GetStatisticsForIndividuals(iParent, spouse) >= 4,"had_Alt","have"))
Line 350 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died
Line 359 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died

TimeLine.xml

Line 104 Report.WritePhraseDic "PhTL_Union", Dic("They"), u.Type, u.Date.ToStringNarrative, u.Place.NameNarrative, u.Officiator.Title, u.Officiator, u.Witnesses, Dic(Util.IfElse(f.AreTogether, "Are_Alt", "Were_Alt"))

Regards,

Hugo

By Rjn - Friday, May 4, 2007
jcguasp (5/3/2007)

I'm no linguistic expert but, as today, I do not know any super-program which can translate 2 languages 100%. And I don't think Genopro can do that either (phrase construction and words order, genders, agreement of adjectives with nouns, ...).


I have come to same conclusion myself, one-to-one translation using one universal model is -I guess- impossible. But then again, if we can keep the phrases and structure of the text simple enough (which is possible because there is only limited set of words -except names!- we need to manipulate and inflect) I believe it is possible to find a way to have nearly universal model... but then it is necessary to look into grammar book and learn about grammatical cases in English as well in order to cover the needs of other languages.

Variety of grammatical cases is enormous. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case
Luckily only few of these of particular use, and this is just what I mean by saying that text should be simple enough. It's just that, like Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." At present, the report is designed for English-only and grammatic provided is way too simple to cover other languages adequately.

jcguasp (5/3/2007)

1) make sure every bit to be translated are all grouped into Dic.xml, i.e. no left over in the other htm and script files, including any Meta data and the Frameset/Safeguard thing.


I agree. It is very important that every single text visible in the report can be translated modifying one single file, and that any further additions of "tags" come, for example, in the end of this document in chronological order so you don't have to check or re-translate the whole file again.

jcguasp (5/3/2007)

Now for the issue of Genopro itself in other languages, people are also desperate to get it/them. If not mistaken, this job should only be a pure simple word translation of the various menus? + Help feature. You'll have to do this facility fairly quickly because, to my opinion, you're loosing a lot of potential Clients at the moment. Unfortunately, this Genopro language version goes along with the corresponding skin version, isn'it.


This is exactly what I tried to say in one of my previous posts:
Translation or just skins?
I hope this is one of the main priorities. I think it will also serve producing skins in other languages.
By Rjn - Friday, May 4, 2007
JcMorin (5/3/2007)
GenoPro is working on the translation of the application itself, and this includesalso the translation of the report. I'm sure they will be a couple changes to match non-English language.

GenoPro will probably support English, French, German and Russian while the other languages will supported and maintain by the community.


Just curious... how did you pick just these languages? Tongue:

Proposition: Regarding the community, wouldn't it be a good idea to have a separate "sub-forum" for Language Versions and then "subtree" for each Language (I mean the structure of this forum: Genopro 2007 >> Language Versions >> English), because I don't think this language-talk falls under any of the existing (Suggestions..., Bug Report, Report Generator, Familytrees...) anymore. Talk about specific language version beyond report generator, that is, the program itself & website and more, deserves and needs a "subtree" of its own now as these talks expand... (referring to subjects in "Translation and Grammar issues" which are often "Translation into language X".)
By GenoProSupport - Friday, May 4, 2007
Rjn (5/4/2007)
Just curious... how did you pick just these languages? Tongue:

My girlfriend speaks five languages and certified translator in English-German-Russian.  My mother tongue is French, so I can do the French version myself.

We will create a dedicated forum for each language.  The forum will be self-moderated by userd capable to vote and report abuse.

By rboshuis - Sunday, May 6, 2007
rboshuis
There is an inconsistency in using the singular/plural form. i.o.w. sometimes two different entries in the dictionary are used,
....
It would be good to see if we can use a single way in order to express singular and plural forms.
This requires a a considerable amount of recoding, I'll work on it

Ron,

The most urgent issue I have with the plural forms is the 'had' .

The problem is that in english, the singular and plural form are the same. THis is not true for a lot of other languages. Hence I had to change the code and added a plural form for the 'had'. Most often this happens when you have a sentence as ' They had one child."

In english this is the same as 'She had one child'. In Dutch though, it says: "Zij hadden een kind" and "Zij had een kind". Hence the importance of at least having a plural form of had is extemely important. I haven't run into a lot of other issues that couldn't be resolved otherwise.

rgds,

Ronald

By haep - Monday, May 7, 2007
The most urgent issue I have with the plural forms is the 'had' .

Hi rboshuis,

Try this:

In Lang.vbs change the fowllowing lines to:

Line 337 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more children died
Line 334 strHaveOrHad1 = Dic(Util.IfElse(Util.GetStatisticsForIndividuals(iParent, spouse) >= 4,"had_Alt","have"))
Line 350 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died
Line 359 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died

And in Dictionary.xml add this tag in a new just before line 617 as follows:

Line 617            <Had T="had"/>
Insert this Line    <Had_Alt T="had"/> <!-- Plurial -->
Line 618            <Have T="have"/>

Regards,

Hugo

By genome - Monday, May 7, 2007
See http://support.genopro.com/FindPost17661.aspx for a solution to the plural form of 'had' , the Spanish 'to be' translations and other translation issues.
By genome - Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Have posted a newer version RC2 at http://support.genopro.com/FindPost17661.aspx that has a solution for
maru-san
Another change is required (option) for the Japanese version. A person in an official paper or report is addressed with Full Name (LN+FN), not only by FN. In order to make it correct there should be an option for selection, but still keeping all other related topics correct(possessive proper noun i.e.).
that can also be used by others who require alternative name formats
By rboshuis - Tuesday, May 8, 2007
haep (5/7/2007)
The most urgent issue I have with the plural forms is the 'had' .

Hi rboshuis,

Try this:

In Lang.vbs change the fowllowing lines to:

Line 337 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more children died
Line 334 strHaveOrHad1 = Dic(Util.IfElse(Util.GetStatisticsForIndividuals(iParent, spouse) >= 4,"had_Alt","have"))
Line 350 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died
Line 359 strHaveOrHad = Dic("Had_Alt") ' One or more adopted children died

And in Dictionary.xml add this tag in a new just before line 617 as follows:

Line 617            <Had T="had"/>
Insert this Line    <Had_Alt T="had"/> <!-- Plurial -->
Line 618            <Have T="have"/>

Regards,

Hugo

Hugo,

That is more of less what I did (the only difference being I called Had_Alt HadM instead). But since I've been doing this in every single version since the earlier beta versions, you can imagine that I got quite a little bit fed up with changing it continuously.

Ron,

I'll test it tomorrow evening and let you know the results.

Kind regards,

Ronald

By maru-san - Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Ron (5/8/2007)
Have posted a newer version RC2 at http://support.genopro.com/FindPost17661.aspx that has a solution for
maru-san
Another change is required (option) for the Japanese version. A person in an official paper or report is addressed with Full Name (LN+FN), not only by FN. In order to make it correct there should be an option for selection, but still keeping all other related topics correct(possessive proper noun i.e.).
that can also be used by others who require alternative name formats

Thanks Ron, works nice and easy to set up, including the other changes.
By genome - Wednesday, May 9, 2007
I have made a further changes to the proposed 2.0.0.5 release of the Narrative skin that start to address some of the masculine/feminine language issues. see Narrative Report 2.0.0.5 release candidate I am not a language specialist and so I am not able to determine how good a solution it provides so I will await feedback with interest.

If any of you are still struggling with translation issues then please post a clear definition of the problem with examples and if possible rules of grammar involved. I can then see if a solution is possible. Of course if you already have a solution please let us know!