OpenXcom Forum
Contributions => Translations => Topic started by: SupSuper on September 20, 2011, 11:19:38 pm
-
Here you can discuss any linguistic matters about the original game strings. Maybe you don't like the style of English they use? The punctuation is off somewhere? Those uppercase seem inappropriate? You don't like the particular alignment or spacing on a screen? You just like being picky fussy and this is your dream come true? :P
This is mainly to keep every language consistent in case of any changes/improvements to the original game strings that might affect every translation. For example:
The only thing I changed (regarding the text style) was to use sentence case instead of uppercase for the UFOPedia descripitons of the XCOM Crafts & Craft Armaments because I thought that it wasn't consistent with the rest of the descriptions (lowercase).
Discuss. :)
-
Is it possible to "overflow" the text container for those glyphs?
Or add a special symbol (for the diacritics) on top of the original text? (there should be a finite number of character cases... and some can may be approximated with others)
This is a technical restriction because the uppercase letters take up the whole font space with no room for glyphs on top (as you can see in the "custom font" thread), so the original developers had to skew the letters to fit and I maintained the tradition. :P It's a tough situation, the only solutions would be:
- Increase the font size to accomodate upper glyphs, but this would probably make text not fit in the UI anymore because it's too tightly designed for the current font size (so the glyphs would kinda pop out).
- Decrease all the letters so they can fit upper glyphs without looking uneven, but then the text would probably look weird with all the "blank space" on top.
I would like to see a build with the #2 option, for reference, if possible.
-
Funny that there is such a thread because I was just wondering where I should put this:
- The translation string for the German STR_QUIT and STR_CANCEL is the same and in my opinion wrongly so (I am a native speaker). It bugged me every time I exited the game to be honest...
- And I realized that the German Patrolling string loaded in CraftPatrolState.cpp is too long to fit the Text field. I arbitrarily increased the Text field width for this string and checked whether the change affects the English version of the game which does not seem to be the case. I do not know how the other versions will fare though...
(Patch attached for reference)
How do you think such cases should be handled best?
-
Funny that there is such a thread because I was just wondering where I should put this:
- The translation string for the German STR_QUIT and STR_CANCEL is the same and in my opinion wrongly so (I am a native speaker). It bugged me every time I exited the game to be honest...
- And I realized that the German Patrolling string loaded in CraftPatrolState.cpp is too long to fit the Text field. I arbitrarily increased the Text field width for this string and checked whether the change affects the English version of the game which does not seem to be the case. I do not know how the other versions will fare though...
(Patch attached for reference)
How do you think such cases should be handled best?
I think you did the right thing for what you mentioned, and have committed your patch.
-
Nice! I will write again if I find something else (maybe on github if it's something larger).
Would it be possible that changes of Text field sizes negatively affect other languages (i. e. their Text positioning) or are we safe in this regard?
-
I think we're safe since every language is aligned the same, we don't have anything like RTL yet.
-
Long time i wanted to ask about a string in XCom / OpenXcom.
It is STR_CYDONIA_OR_BUST.
Which in English is "Cydonia or Bust".
What is the true meaning of that word "Bust" in this situation?
Bust as in Busted / Fail /Downfall ?
So is this string means "Win or X-COM project terminated" ?
Or what?
-
Long time i wanted to ask about a string in XCom / OpenXcom.
It is STR_CYDONIA_OR_BUST.
Which in English is "Cydonia or Bust".
What is the true meaning of that word "Bust" in this situation?
Bust as in Busted / Fail /Downfall ?
So is this string means "Win or X-COM project terminated" ?
Or what?
"X or Bust" is a tricky English expression, it means something like putting everything you got into reaching X as if it's the only option, like "go to X or go bust (broke/busted/etc.)". In this case you could see it as "Reach Cydonia or die trying" (literally :P).
I don't think there's any equivalent expressions in other languages, so use your best judgement.
-
There are equivalent expressions in other languages, though maybe slightly longer :)
-
Then i thought right.
I translated it as if it would be "Cydonia or doom/debacle/failure".
I think it can be translated also as if it would be "Cydonia or death", it would express the essence too.
-
"Cydonia or Fail" sounds like a good alternative if "fail" has a good translation in your language.
-
Something I noticed while working on the Ufopaedia is that original X-Com has separate names for aliens and autopsies, eg. "Sectoid" and "autopsy" (even though corpses are all in one string, argh my consistency!!! :P).
This poses a problem for translating because languages have different orders, while in english you might write it as "Sectoid autopsy", in french it would be "Autopsie du Sectoid" or something, so I think it's better to have new strings for it all instead of trying to be "optimized". What do you think?
-
I agree! New strings solution is better. BTW, when will you make a new Destination string? :)
"autospy"
LOL! :D
-
I also agree, definitely a good idea SupSuper.
-
Generally, preparing a program for localization means avoiding assembling sentences in code, making the whole sentence available for the transators.
As a native Greek speaker I can only envy English programmers that can do assembling so easy, but localization is where is comes back to bite us.
-
oh, i totally hadn't thought about this sort of thing when i was doing string templates in alien research, is this going to be a problem? since HAVING a string template is also used as a flag for being a live alien, so i've used things like STR_SECTOID + STR_LIVE_COMMANDER, but this order should probably be reversed in... certain languages? granted the easiest solution would be to transpose the order of the string template in the ruleset, but then we'd have two sets of rulesets to choose from depending on the language and... ugh.
maybe another way would be to have a boolean flag attached to each language set that we can check to see if we need to swap the order.
i don't know, i'm tired, i don't know how big of a problem this is, i guess it's a factor of how many languages need this sort of behaviour?
in any case, i'm sure there's no easy fix for this because not all languages are created equal, and there will always be special cases and conjugations that seem bizarre to a non-speaker and all that kind of fun.
easiest solution: offer English, Francais and Deutsch at the startup menu and only deal with those three. ever.
-
And why karvanitis' solution isn't good?
(eg. "%1 %2" in english.lng, "%2 %1" in other languages, where %1 could be "sectoid" and %2 could be "commander" (i mean it is replaced with some format() method)
-
Generally, preparing a program for localization means avoiding assembling sentences in code, making the whole sentence available for the transators.
As a native Greek speaker I can only envy English programmers that can do assembling so easy, but localization is where is comes back to bite us.
Yeah the only reason the language files are like this is because that's how they were in the original X-Com (not a great example lol), and I didn't fancy manually going through it all making it more translator-friendly.
oh, i totally hadn't thought about this sort of thing when i was doing string templates in alien research, is this going to be a problem? since HAVING a string template is also used as a flag for being a live alien, so i've used things like STR_SECTOID + STR_LIVE_COMMANDER, but this order should probably be reversed in... certain languages? granted the easiest solution would be to transpose the order of the string template in the ruleset, but then we'd have two sets of rulesets to choose from depending on the language and... ugh.
maybe another way would be to have a boolean flag attached to each language set that we can check to see if we need to swap the order.
i don't know, i'm tired, i don't know how big of a problem this is, i guess it's a factor of how many languages need this sort of behaviour?
in any case, i'm sure there's no easy fix for this because not all languages are created equal, and there will always be special cases and conjugations that seem bizarre to a non-speaker and all that kind of fun.
easiest solution: offer English, Francais and Deutsch at the startup menu and only deal with those three. ever.
Probably the best solution would be to merge all the combinations into singular strings to avoid templates and hacks (like I did for autopsies), it's more strings but less error-prone at least. Format solution like "%1 %2" might not always work since such word combinations can depend on the words being combined. Eg. languages with gender for every word: if "Sectoid" is male than "Commander" needs to be male too, but if it was female then it would need to be female too. I18N is a complex beast. :P
-
I support SupSuper's idea... IHMO "%1 %2" or "%1-%2" like is not very good way, because of very subtle and probably indefinable rules. I think it would be better to have exact text strings for these pairs.. for each race-rank combination.
-
now i'm starting to see why localization is one of SupSuper's personal development hells.
despite how much flack i give english for being the dumbest language on the planet (see the word tear for an example if you're not sure why) from a development standpoint, it's a pleasure to work with.
-
Question: are proper names, such as "Skyranger", "Avalanche", etc, supposed to be translated or transliterated?
-
Question: are proper names, such as "Skyranger", "Avalanche", etc, supposed to be translated or transliterated?
The first one is translated and the second is transliterated in Hungarian. :)
-
Question: are proper names, such as "Skyranger", "Avalanche", etc, supposed to be translated or transliterated?
I'd say that proper names that are just capitalisations of or combinations of common names should be translated to something that evokes a similar image. Sky and ranger may not go together in your language, and Avalanche is definitely translatable, assuming it makes sense to name a missile after a snowfall in your language.
Where you run into difficulty is proper names like Sectoid or Muton, which are combinations of existing words and prefixes. :)