Topic: =D at one of the best Linux games around
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LiSrt Topic Opener
Joined: 2010-10-02, 17:59
Posts: 11  Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2010-10-02, 18:18
I installed Widelands by chance when bored when I was looking through the Mandriva package lists and got sucked into what seems to be one of the few enjoyable games available on Linux - it's surprising that it doesn't have more recognition. I discovered this forum more recently and wanted to say how much I appreciate the good work that all the developers have done on this game - the completed parts are extremely well polished and it's quite possible to spend many hours at a time pleasantly building a realm without getting bored. I might even be able to help if the administrators of the project think it could be useful - some of the English in-game text appears not to have been written by a native English speaker and could maybe benefit from some changes - if someone told me how to edit the various text files (e.g. the words of advisers in the tutorial missions) I'd be happy to do this. (Please don't think I am criticising the game overall - just trying to point out areas it could perhaps be improved.) Again, thanks to everyone who worked on this - please continue, it's appreciated. 
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SirVer
Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1440  One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at: 2010-10-02, 19:08
Thanks for the praise About the english texts: yes, most developers are no native speakers. But touching old texts is always something that we have to consider very carefully: if you change one word in a sentence, the whole sentence needs to be retranslated - a huge workload. Some of the texts of the older campaigns are not ideal, but it is very much better to check new texts before they are translated. So yes, help is appreciated. It is rather easy to checkout the widelands sources and push corrections. Check our wiki for help how to do this (for example BzrPrimer).
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LiSrt Topic Opener
Joined: 2010-10-02, 17:59
Posts: 11 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2010-10-02, 19:36
Understood - I'll check out how to push changes and would only submit anything if it's exactly the same meaning; I'd also try to view text proposed for new missions too. The kind of thing I'm thinking of (these examples are not from anything in the Widelands game): a French speaker may use the English phrase "Is it that you are well?" because that is close to a word-for-word translation of what would be said in French (I think! - it's a long time since I learned any French...) a native English speaker would probably say "Are you well?" - exactly the same meaning, but the structure is more natural to the English speaker. (Anyone remotely fluent in more than one language probably knows all this already, so sorry for the detail!) Hopefully changes like that wouldn't conflict with translations already done.
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SirVer
Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1440 One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at: 2010-10-02, 23:53
The problem is more of technical nature: There is stuff translated at launchpad, if the string changes in english, launchpad doesn't recognize it as the same string anymore and throws the translation away. The new string is marked as not translated and as there is no way to get to the prior translation that launchpad threw away, the string needs to be retranslated. Maybe there is another way, but at the moment I do not know it then. That's what I meant to say more or less: Correcting the english grammar before they hit trunk (and with this the translation stage on launchpad) is much much much more important as changes then are not hurtful to the translations. Changes after this must be considered with extreme care. That doesn't mean that we will never accept any changes in old texts. You might want to read through the new atlantean texts in our campaigns branch on launchpad, these texts are new and there will be much more in the weeks to come. You can find it here: https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/campaigns
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sigra
Joined: 2009-03-05, 19:02
Posts: 130  At home in WL-forums Location: Orsa |
Posted at: 2010-10-03, 09:55
That sounds truly horrible. Yes, there is definitely another way. The way translations have been done in Free Software for over a decade (I was there). If a string changes a little, it is recognized by Gettext as similar to the old one and marked as fuzzy. The translator does not have to retranslate it, only review and adjust the tranlation. Worked fine for every project, including Widelands. If this no longer works, the project will surely be left alone by any serious tranlation contributor.
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SirVer
Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1440 One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at: 2010-10-03, 11:39
Truth be told, since we moved to web based translations, widelands has seen a huge jump in translations - even though we lost fuzzy strings in the move. So we are not left alone, in fact, we gained sooo many translators. The guys over at launchpad plan to support fuzzy string [1], but not in the gettext way (which they did before and dropped for some reason) [2]. The open source community as you describe it has not translated widelands to a big amount in ten years (I was there as well), the web based translation community accelerated this process by a huge amount. Some quirks for the developers and in the toolset is well worth this increase IMHO. Practicality beats purity here. Maybe launchpad will deliver fuzzy strings one day, till then, we must cope. [1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/rosetta/+spec/rosetta-fuzzy-merge Edited: 2010-10-03, 11:40
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smoku
Joined: 2010-07-19, 09:37
Posts: 15 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2010-10-03, 13:48
There is an easier way. Do not ever touch the in-code strings. If the string is wrong grammar, fix the en_US or en_UK translation. It's recommended to treat in-code strings as identifiers and have a "proper" English translation anyway. It's mostly empty because most strings do not need translating, but allows for fixing the ones that got wrong to the code.
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SirVer
Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
Posts: 1440 One Elder of Players Location: Germany - Munich |
Posted at: 2010-10-03, 15:35
That is a good suggestion. Feel free to do this on launchpad's translations!
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LiSrt Topic Opener
Joined: 2010-10-02, 17:59
Posts: 11 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2010-10-03, 19:41
Excellent! - I think I will try to get started - en_UK at least, hopefully there's an American reading this who's inspired to do the same for en_US.
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LiSrt Topic Opener
Joined: 2010-10-02, 17:59
Posts: 11 Pry about Widelands |
Posted at: 2010-10-04, 10:42
Hmm - Launchpad doesn't seem to have en_US - it just seems to assume that "English" on its own is English as spoken in the USA... I'm working on en_GB at the moment, things like changing "defense" to "defence", and replacing translations that seem to have been done in Dutch accidentally. I think I'm using Launchpad correctly - please let me know if not.
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