Topic: How can I help with English (US) copyediting?

I didn't mean to imply that knowledge of the coding languages (which as I recall are C++ and Python and LUA scripting languages) is required.

Heaven knows I am no coder, but, by limiting my modifications to the obvious text blocks, even a non-coder like me can offer edited versions of code containing embedded text.

The "trick" is finding where the text you wish to alter resides. That is where our coding brothers (and sisters) can direct us and the IRC Chat Room is a great place to give a "shout out" for assistance in that vein. Similarly, opening a forum thread like this one or initiating a "Bug Report" on Launchpad can serve to draw ATtention to your INtentions.

Just ask and it may be given.

I see little people.

Top

Quote

heartsinger wrote: Ha! Turns out I can edit it on my Linux Notepad-analogue program, which was one of the problems I was having (.lua files? How do I make my system like .lua files? Oh, wait...), so now I'm working on editing the text for the tutorial.

I am unsure if I missunderstood you, however to clear things up: The best would be, to fix almost all of the problems via "translation" at https://translations.launchpad.net/widelands/trunk/+lang/en_US - of course it is strange to translate from "English" to "English", but as you already noted below, there is a difference between UK and US English, not to mention Australien English (and well I most likely missed a Country with their own kind of English, what about Ireland for example?).

Generally it still seems like a good idea to fix serious logic, grammar or typo errors in the code. However once talking about typos, we have to be careful as we are already facing the UK vs. US vs. AU vs XYZ problem (eg "color" vs. "colour").

Thus we have to keep in mind, that changing a text line in our code (c++, lua, etc.) generally leads to two problems:

1. Native "English" speaker from different countries will keep on fixing text that would be totally fine in another country (the UK vs. US vs. ... problem) -> We already faced that problem before
2. Every changed line of text leads to an invalidation of existing translations - and widelands has translations for 49 none English languages at the moment (although not all are that complete)

Keeping that in mind, a text like "I thinks ths santens hath sum serios errors." should still be fixed inside the code , but well I guess you already understand the point.

So if you are working on the lua files, keep in mind: especially the "it's not a real typo or grammar problem, it just does not sound typical 'English'"-problems should better be solved in the translations on Launchpad.

"Barbarians, Empire, and Atlantians"? One of these is not like the others. Shouldn't it be "Imperials?"

The answer is Yesno - we discussed it before and the difference is by design. Actually the difference is based upon the idea of "one independent barbarian tribe" - there is no stable state construct so you just play barbarians, "one independent atlantean settlement" - Atlantis drowned and thus the survivors where split resulting in different atlantean settlements far away of their drowned home, but there is still "the Empire".

Of course it would sound better to see "the Empire" instead of "Empire" in the list of playable tribes, but well... that was discussed before as well and we decided to go by Empire as a "given name".

Cheers

Peter

Top

Quote

I'm back! My computer decided to die entirely and by the time I had gotten my ancient computer working again, I had moved on to another game... So now that I'm on my ancient computer, I'll see how well this game runs on such an outdated machine.

As for UK and US translations, personally when I see decidedly UK spelling and phrasing (such as the aforementioned colour) in games, I simply assume the game was created (or the in-game setting is) in Europe somewhere and accept it for what it is, knowing that, in the game's country of origin, the spelling is correct. I don't know about how other people feel, but my thoughts on the matter would prevent the need for a "translation" from UK to US English which would save a fair portion of work. The "two" languages are so extraordinarily similar that the only time we might even notice anything more than an extra letter here or there is in long blocks of text where whole phrases that are not used in the US are included.

Oh, by the way, I hope my suggestion for improving the sentence structure of the tooltips helped fix them. Sorry I wasn't around to implement the changes like I was intending to

Top

Quote