"Comments off" and other things

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Hi folks,
translating R2-Church into german, I noticed a few things:

1) Situation: showing posts archived by date or category (it doesn't matter which one) and one of the posts has comments off
[attachment=2:1s7r7fl6]comments-off-cat.jpg[/attachment:1s7r7fl6]
The text, which shows up "Comments off" doesn't come from the theme, as one would expect, but from comment-template.php which is located in the "wp-includes" folder. I had to search through all theme and WordPress files for "comments off" to find the where the text is comming from (in order to translate it).

Why doesn't the theme text "comments closed" show up and why does it instead take the text from a wordpress file?

2) Situation: showing a post with comments off
[attachment=1:1s7r7fl6]comments-off-post.jpg[/attachment:1s7r7fl6]
On the right side of the post - namely in the dateright div - there's a text showing "Leave a comment" even though comments are off, which is then written correctly under Comments: "Comments are closed."

This is how it looks like when a post is shown where comments are on:
[attachment=0:1s7r7fl6]comments-on-post.jpg[/attachment:1s7r7fl6]

The solution would be to check whether the post has comments turned off or on and according to this then set the link for comments or not.
If someone knows how to do this, please reply to this post. I need to change this until the Friday evening. Thanks.

3) I am updating a site running an old WP version. Back then I didn't use any tags, so now there's this Tags line under each post but no tags showing up, cos I ain't got any ;)

So, how can I get the tags to not show up if there aren't any? Maybe something like this:

<?php if (the_tags('') =='') {the_tags('')} endif; ?>

Any help is appreciated! Thanks :)

Antonio