During my brave quest of translating the major part v0.9 into German, I discovered many small problems with the multi-language support. I have added links to the issues. Use the issue number to refer to them.
[ul][li]Issue 4653: There are some strings which have lots of trailing or leading whitespace. This doesn’t seem right to me. I think any leading or trailing spaces should usually be eliminated in the original strings. There may be some exceptions.[/li]
[li]Issue 4653: An example this are the strings you see at the right part of the map. It seems those strings must have a constant length with the rest filled with spaces. Well, this sucks. What sucks even more is that launchpad.net automatically adds the same amount of white space as in the original string. It is not possible to disable this behaviour. I asked them. They told me that this whitespace stuff is a bad idea and I should go complain to you instead. I have to partly agree with them, but on the other hand I hate it when software attempts to be smarter than the user. 
To see the result of this, try CDDA 0.9 with the German translation (download it from Launchpad).[/li]
[li]Issue 4654: Some numbers always use a “.” as a decimal seperator. Not all languages do this. German, for example, uses “,”. In master, I saw this has been fixed for most of the numbers but not all.[/li]
[li]Issue 4655: Space is sometimes very short:
[list][]The word “OR” which appears in construction and crafting menu does not permit a translation longer than two characters.
[]The bionic description field is WAY to short. The bionics screen provides enough space to add extra space.
[]Same goes for trait and profession descriptions in character creation screen. 3 lines just don’t cut it.
[]Same goes for the character menu, which also uses 3 lines for trait descriptions.
[]Translating the help is annoying. You have a limited number of help screens and all the text MUST fit into it. Does not always work. Space is especially scarce in the gun help screens. My suggestion is to expose the strings not screen-per-screen but paragraph per paragraph and the game simply appends as many paragraphs into a screen which fit and if one paragraph would exceed a screen, the game dynamically adds it to the next screen. So the number of help screens per topic is dynamic. This would make it a lot more translation friendly.
[]CDDA often behaves strangely when it encounters a string which is too long. I stopped counting the examples.
[/list]
The obvious solution is: Well, give us more space! ;-)[/li]
[li]Issue 4649 (fixed): Support for grammatical number (singular/plural in English) is not consequently used but should. Since gettext has excellent grammatical number support, this should not be a problem. The offending strings which should have a grammatical number but haven’t are:
[list]
[]No. 635, 658, 659, 2363 and 2684 in Launchpad.
[]All item names. To show you that this is neccessary, I tell you that I even saw some strings with “%ss” which makes “plastic bottle” to “plastic bottles”, “cranberry” to “cranberrys”, oh, wait! And of course all occourences of “%ss” should probably be changed to “%s” after adding grammatical number support to the item names.
[/list][/li]
[li]Issue 4650 (fixed): Tabs in the crafting menu don’t order nicely in the German translation (and probably other languages as well), when the entered text is longer than the English counterpart. Please consider the string length when building the tabs.[/li]
[li]Issue 4651: Faction names suck. They suck as hell. I have absolutely no idea how to translate these. The names are probably too fixated on the English Grammar. Luckily factions are not developed yet. When you start to develop factions, I strongly suggest to rebuild the name generator from scratch, but this time with other languages in mind.[/li]
[li]Issue 4658: There are some strings which seem to be made in a “glue-them-together” manner. One example are the descriptions for factions (there are other examples as well). Needless to say, it is just a pain in the ass to translate these strings, because it is hard to tell the context. Such strings came up in the WTF thread. I strongly suggest to use format strings as often as possible.[/li]
[li]Issue 4648 (fixed): The help strings also have another problem: Format strings are handled VERY strangely there. It wasn’t really neccessary to put strings like “pressing ‘%s’”, “pushing ‘%s’”, “holding down the %s key” into their own strings. This makes translating much more complicated than it should be. The format strings in the help should really just refer to the key name and not anything else (not even quotes) and those extra strings should be discarded.[/li]
[li]Issue 4652: I have very bad problems with grammatical case. English doesn’t have case, but a lot of European languages do. Like German. It is not possible to translate many strings into German with the correct case. This is the only problem where I can’t come up with a simple solution, sorry.[/li][/ul]
Developers, please tell me which of my concerns are valid. I’ll post then to the issue tracker then.
Edit: I got told to add all points to the issue tracker. Okay then, so I did. I added links to all issues on the list above.
And by all means, the trouble isn’t solely with plurals, there are declination forms that would need a significant improvement to the whole translation effort. This is where “the simpler the better” logic comes in handy, you can always be verbose where it counts for that matter.