Linguistics and style discussion station

[SupSuper]

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?

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.

[kkmic]

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. 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.

[Shugyousha]

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?

[SupSuper]

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.

[Shugyousha]

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?

[SupSuper]

I think we're safe since every language is aligned the same, we don't have anything like RTL yet.

[Fenyő]

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?

[SupSuper]

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 ).
I don't think there's any equivalent expressions in other languages, so use your best judgement.

[Volutar]

There are equivalent expressions in other languages, though maybe slightly longer

[Fenyő]

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.

[Daiky]

"Cydonia or Fail" sounds like a good alternative if "fail" has a good translation in your language.

[SupSuper]

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!!! ).

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?

[Fenyő]

I agree! New strings solution is better. BTW, when will you make a new Destination string?

"autospy"

LOL!

[powerc80]

I also agree, definitely a good idea SupSuper.

[karvanit]

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.