Linguistics and style discussion station

[Warboy1982]

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.

[Fenyő]

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)

[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.

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.

[Volutar]

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.

[Warboy1982]

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.

[daggerstab]

Question: are proper names, such as "Skyranger", "Avalanche", etc, supposed to be translated or transliterated?

[Fenyő]

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.

[54x]

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.