I am translating some documents into German and have stumbled upon an issue with the Reference §this
In English, using §this will produce the result
"[…] this Sec. 1.1 […] "
if used in Art. 1.1.
If Art. 1.1 has a cross-tag called “definitions”, using §definitions within Art. 1.1 will produce the same wording:
"[…] this Sec. 1.1 […] "
In the German version, using §this produces the uniform
"[…] diese Abschnitt. 1.1 […] "
Unlike English, German grammar has several demonstrative articles. Depending on the sentence, it could be correct to use either “diese”, “dieser”, “diesem”, “dieses”. In English the problem does not occur, as “this” is always correct. The Clausebase German default of “diese Abschnitt” is however wrong in most cases.
I thus have the problem in German that I cannot have a clause that refers to itself in it’s own body in a way that is grammatically correct. This problems does not occur when I reference a clause in a different clause, as using (from the above example) §definitions in Art. 1.2 will result in:
"[…] Abschnitt. 1.1 […] "
allowing me to hard-code the correct article in front of the reference.
Is there any way to have a clause refer to itself, using §this or another method, that does not auto-include “diese” ?
I was wondering if anybody has an idea or workaround to remove the word “this” from the §this reference. I most certainly do not want to change the current §this behavior and break all C9 documents - maybe I can turn this into a feature request for a special function:
@remove-prefix(§this) would output only “Sec. 1.1” instead of “this Sec. 1.1” when used in a clause referencing itself. This would also be useful for other languages, at the very least in German.
This is now implemented. The function is called @remove-this — see the documentation.
Essentially, you can use it both with §this and with other references (e.g., cross-tags and concept-references) that happen to insert the word “this” when they end up referring to the current article. By wrapping within @remove-this, the word “this” (or its translation) gets removed.