The last of the obviously translatable strings in the codebase have now been marked for translation. A quick count tells me that “lang/po/cataclysm-dda.pot” now contains over 9000 translatable strings (although over 1000 of those are proper names, not too sure what to do with those).
This means the first stage of translation support is complete.
Now that most of the strings are marked, we’ll be relying on translators and testers to point out any strings that aren’t in the .pot file. Those can then be hunted down and marked on a case-by-case basis. So when someone finds some english in the game that isn’t in the translation file, they need to point it out. That can be done here.
This is also good time to post your translations, even if they’re only partially complete (or submit them as a pull request on github). If you post them here, i can add them to the git repo, and merge the new translatable strings into them at the same time.
So, if you have:
[ul][li]complete or partially complete translations not in the git repo[/li]
[li]reports of english in the game but not in the cataclysm-dda.pot file[/li][/ul]
then please post them here so i can merge / mark them
Next stage of translation support will be figuring out the best way to package translations with releases. Then probably finding a solution for languages with gendered nouns.
Translating new items and updating translatable strings will be a continuing process ;).
I think you can either leave them as is (John is still John in Russian/Chinese/Spanish/French/…).
Or you could add some flavorful touches, like instead of Charley is might be Carlos (Spanish).
Or instead of John it might be Jean (French).
Instead of Alexei it might be Алексей (Russian).
Just sorta find names that might be related and plug them in, if you cant find related names we can always say it was a foreigner in the country.
OK, it’s all done.
I really don’t have a clue if anyone here can speak serbo-croatian, which is similar to Serbian language as a white cat to a black one, but I’ll paste mine here so I can maybe have some sort of support at any point.
I quadruple-checked all the entries, top to bottom. It’s all there, and I’m pretty certain about the correct phrasing. I’ve left the french-named power drill since it’s sooo convenient, and maybe another thing or two as I found them in the start. The checking included the syntax; errors may still be there, but I haven’t seen them so my estimate is about 99,9% proper formatting.
I abbreviated the malicious ManHack as “The Cutter”, translated it of course, as it is something that people speaking my language can relate with. Also, I aimed at keeping some of the shortened terminology in tact, so “UPS” is there, “SMG” also, and so on. The thing that’s maybe left for judgement is concerned with the newer stuff, and the notorious “heavy fletched” arrows. I thought of them as the Fast ones, and did so write with the translation. Of course, of course, descriptions clearly state what it’s all about.
Furthermore, I’m looking ahead to translate other bits, such as maps and skills, all in due time.
@vultures:
I merged all the newly marked strings with the .po file. It’s now too large to attach here. You can download the updated .po file from here on github.
There are many new strings to translate. The merge also tried to automatically fill in some entries that had changed in a minor (or major) way. These will all be marked with “fuzzy” in the comment above the entry. They need to be reviewed and the “fuzzy” comment removed. This is slightly easier to do with a translation editing program, but not hard to do by hand.
BTW, there was a small problem in that the translations are supposed to go in the “msgstr” part, and the “msgid” part is supposed to stay english :). But it was easy to fix.
In other news, I’ve just written some detailed instructions for translators, they’re up in a pull request and can be found here for now.
Thank you for your efforts; actually I thought about it and it’s good, really nice to keep things this way. There are things that are ought to be transparent; if everyone were to just push things on Git like every other piece of code then it would be us just feeding the project. This way it lives by us, the way I see it, and discussing it will only increase the variety we create when throwing ideas at each other.
It’s very, very nice to have someone looking after the translation work, and looking forward to what it will become.
I think that (my concern only) most of the translators don’t have an actual comprehension of what the game does when generating those names from the “pool” of two-letter pieces. A starter explanation would aid some, only to suffice the self-explanatory faction generation bit. The latter also needs some mindwork to get a grasp on, but it can be done once the translator makes up his mind what he’s about to do with the generator.
