key localization questions

[Ali El Dada <eldada at student dot chalmers dot se>]

hi,

As i said this a few months ago here, my Master's thesis is on Arabic 
Language Technology, it's open source, and can help the way localization 
is done. I got a paper accepted to the Arabic Linguistics Symposium 
(next week!), so there are a few things i want to be sure of before 
finishing the paper and presenting my subject, things about how 
localization is done..

i have translated myself a few files once under the arabeyes project 
using kbabel, so i have the general idea: you translate (sometimes 
out-of-context) strings..

and when you have a string like: "you have n new messages", where n can 
be any positive integer, the translator provides three arabic words for 
messages: risaala(tun), risaalataan(i), and rasaa'il(u), right? (رسالة، 
رسالتان، رسائل)

but in arabic adjectives agree w/ nouns, so we should translate "new 
messages" as a whole, right? giving the 3 phrases: risaalatun 
jadiidatun, risaaltaani jadiidataani, and rasaa'ilu jadiidatun.. is this 
the way it's done?

thanks for helping, and i hope i'll be fair describing the work you do!

PS: the paper will be online soon for the interested, i'll post a 
message when it is.. the actual software will be available under GPL 
after that

Ali El Dada