[localization] project languages

[GunChleoc]

For changing the Tamil locale:

• Set up the new locale in the Transifex web UI
• Assign the translators to the new locale in the Transifex web UI
• Rename the file in SVN
• Run tx push -l <localename>

Regarding the extraneous language requests, on the projects I manage, I drop the translators a message and point them to the locale that I'd like them to contribute to, then refuse the request. If I'm unsure whether a separate locale is appropriate after all, I ask them before refusing the locale.

@Nescio @Stan`

Edited February 12, 2021 by GunChleoc

[Nescio]

As for localization, a locale is more than just the language; e.g. fr_FR implies A4 paper and the euro, while fr_CA implies the letter size and Canadian dollar. In 0 A.D. we're not interested in paper sizes or currencies, only in the written language, hence why we should simply use fr (and ta instead of ta_IN).

23 hours ago, GunChleoc said:

For changing the Tamil locale:

• Set up the new locale in the Transifex web UI
• Assign the translators to the new locale in the Transifex web UI
• Rename the file in SVN
• Run tx push -l <localename>

@Stan`

Thank you!

On 12/02/2021 at 12:50 PM, sarcoma said:

@soloooy0: En el árbol de civilizaciones vi que dice 'mujer kushita' en vez de 'cusita' y en la descripción dice kushita un par de veces

This is indeed inconsistent and should be corrected. It's probably the result of confusing Kushites (the people from the ancient kingdom of Kush) with Cushitic (the branch of the Afroasiatic language family, of which Oromo and Somali are the most spoken languages nowadays). In 0 A.D. we're only interested in the former, thus the proper Spanish form is kushitas.

Unfortunately some of the translations containing cusitas have been reviewed, which means they can't be changed by most translators, so someone with more priviliges (@av93, @Gallaecio?) should fix this (click on “All resources” and use a “text:kushite” filter).

[sarcoma]

10 hours ago, Nescio said:

This is indeed inconsistent and should be corrected. It's probably the result of confusing Kushites (the people from the ancient kingdom of Kush) with Cushitic (the branch of the Afroasiatic language family, of which Oromo and Somali are the most spoken languages nowadays). In 0 A.D. we're only interested in the former, thus the proper Spanish form is kushitas.

Unfortunately some of the translations containing cusitas have been reviewed, which means they can't be changed by most translators, so someone with more priviliges (@av93, @Gallaecio?) should fix this (click on “All resources” and use a “text:kushite” filter).

Are you sure?

The official standardizer, la RAE, registers only 'cusita', not 'kushita', to refer to both, i think.

https://dle.rae.es/cusita

The bible has several references to the 'cusitas', for example la mujer cusita de Moisés

[Stan`]

I changed it to Kushitas for consistency, and because we're in translation freeze now, if it needs to be switched back, it will have to wait for A25

[Sundiata]

On 12/2/2021 at 11:50 AM, sarcoma said:

@soloooy0: En el árbol de civilizaciones vi que dice 'mujer kushita' en vez de 'cusita' y en la descripción dice kushita un par de veces

20 hours ago, Nescio said:

This is indeed inconsistent and should be corrected. It's probably the result of confusing Kushites (the people from the ancient kingdom of Kush) with Cushitic (the branch of the Afroasiatic language family, of which Oromo and Somali are the most spoken languages nowadays). In 0 A.D. we're only interested in the former, thus the proper Spanish form is kushitas.

9 hours ago, sarcoma said:

Are you sure?

The official standardizer, la RAE, registers only 'cusita', not 'kushita', to refer to both, i think.

https://dle.rae.es/cusita

The bible has several references to the 'cusitas', for example la mujer cusita de Moisés

Yeah, Kush with a "K", is used to refer to the ancient Kingdom of Kush, while Cushitic with a "C" refers to the Cushitic languages, spoken by non-Kushite peoples, even though both Kush and Cush obviously share the same etymology. Lay people confuse these two all the time. I don't think that the official standardizer, la RAE, is a historical source, and considering how often this stuff gets confused even in English, I'm not sure we should follow "official standardizers". When we look at the Spanish Wikipedia page for the Kingdom of Kush, we get 6 matches for "Kushita" and only one match for "Cushita" (the second match for Cushita refers to the unrelated Cushitic languages). Cushitic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages, while Kushites spoke a branch of proto-Nilo-Saharan. Using Cushita or the even rarer Cusita with a "C" even risks playing into Oromo nationalist sentiments and the likes, who like to illegitimately claim Kushite history for some ugly reason.... There's a whole, really ugly backstory for why "Cushitic" languages were named as such and it's highly inappropriate for us all to continue using that term, but these things are difficult to change once they've been coined. Either way, we should not continue associating Cushitic people with Kush proper, even if official standardizers (who know nothing of this history) say so. I know it's confusing... But it is what it is... 

 

[Nescio]

Furthermore, we might want to replace Tagalog with Filipino (the standardized national variety); cf. Indonesian vs Malay.

14 hours ago, sarcoma said:

Are you sure?

The official standardizer, la RAE, registers only 'cusita', not 'kushita', to refer to both, i think.

https://dle.rae.es/cusita

As you can see, none of the five entries there is about the kingdom of Kush.

4 hours ago, Sundiata said:

while Kushites spoke a branch of proto-Nilo-Saharan

Is this true? I'm certainly no expert, however, I vaguely recall:

• Meroitic is too poorly understood to be properly classified (too few bilingual texts);
• Nilo-Saharan is a proposed language family;
• Eastern Sudanic is undemonstrated.

For comparison, the Altaic language family (lumping Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages together) is no longer accepted either.

By the way, it would be nice if you could improve https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/SpecificNames#Meroitic

4 hours ago, Sundiata said:

There's a whole, really ugly backstory for why "Cushitic" languages were named as such

Basically historical Kush → Biblical Cush (grandson of Noah) → unrelated Cushitic languages.

[Sundiata]

23 hours ago, Nescio said:

Is this true?

I'm basing myself primarily on the work of Dr. Claude Rilly, one of the foremost specialists in Meroitic studies:

"Doctor in Egyptology and linguistics, director of the French archaeological mission of Sedeinga (SEDAU), co-editor of the Meroitic Newsletters, member of board of the International Society for Nubian Studies, of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, of the Sudan Archaeology Society (Khartoum), he is currently a research fellow at the CNRS and director of the SFDAS.
He is regarded as one of the world’s specialists in Meroitic language and writing on which he wrote his PhD thesis at the EPHE (a higher education institution of training and research in humanities and social sciences). His research fields concern African linguistics, historical linguistics, Meroitic studies and North Eastern Sudanic languages in a comparative approach."

Of course, he has his detractors, but they are not as widely cited in specialist literature as he is... I think Dr. Kirsty Rowan of the University of London is one of the main contemporary proponents of the Afro-Asiatic classification, and disagrees strongly with Rilly and most other specialists, although she seems less specialized in Meroitic studies than Rilly and her work is also critiqued. Me and most others strongly favor Rilly's work for a number of reasons, but I'm personally not a linguist so there's not much I can say other than that Rilly is far more widely cited in specialist literature. 

Rilly states:

"The position of Meroitic within the Nilo-Saharan phylum, and more precisely in its main branch, East Sudanic, had already been assumed by Bruce Trigger in the 1960s, but without sufficient linguistic evidence (Trigger 1964). The present author recently confirmed Trigger’s assumption. Meroitic belongs to a sub-group of East Sudanic, which I had termed “Northern East Sudanic,” also comprising Nubian (a group of languages from the Nile Valley and western Sudan), Nara (a dialectal group from Eritrea), Taman (a dialectal group from the Chad-Sudan borderland), and Nyima (two languages from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan)" 

You'll probably find this an interesting read: the entry for Meroitic in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology by Claude Rilly: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3128r3sw

He has written a number of books on the subject that go into much greater detail, if you're interested (though I've only read excerpts myself)

 

23 hours ago, Nescio said:

• Meroitic is too poorly understood to be properly classified (too few bilingual texts);

Of course languages aren't just deciphered/translated and classified using bilingual texts. When available, they are the holy grail for translations, sure, but they are not common. Other approaches are required to help translate and classify Meroitic, which have focussed on comparative methods. Aside from obvious loanwords, Afro-Asiatic consistently seems to lead to a dead end, while there is a growing understanding of the relations between Meroitic, Old Nubian, and modern Nubian languages as well as a few other Eastern Sudanic languages.  

 

23 hours ago, Nescio said:

• Nilo-Saharan is a proposed language family;

Sure, but not entirely relevant here. We're talking about Eastern Sudanic Languages here. Their (sometimes contested) relations to Saharan (and certain Sahelian languages further West) are of no concern to us here. The Nubian Language family is entirely uncontested to my knowledge and their relation to a number of other Eastern Sudanic languages are widely accepted. It's within this context we're talking. 

 

23 hours ago, Nescio said:

• Eastern Sudanic is undemonstrated.

I think a lot of specialists would disagree. It seems to be mostly non-specialist, more generalist linguists who contest this. But again, I'm not a linguist myself... 

 

23 hours ago, Nescio said:

Basically historical Kush → Biblical Cush (grandson of Noah) → unrelated Cushitic languages.

You missed the most important part:

historical Kush → Biblical Cush (grandson of Noah) → ...?... → unrelated Cushitic languages.

In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, scientific racism informed many academic opinions on Nile Valley history (and African history in general). The Afro-Asiatic speakers of the Eastern Deserts have skull types and hair types that led certain types of people to classify them as so-called "Caucasoids", distinct from the inherently inferior "Negroid" types. So when the true extent of Kushite civilization started to be uncovered, there were attempts to reclassify the archetype Aethiopian of Antiquity as Caucasians with darker skin. But this idea conflicts with the actual populations of the Upper Nile regions, so a convoluted explanation was fabricated, claiming that the "Caucasoids" of the Eastern Deserts were the real Kushites (hence the term "Cushitic"), while the local populations were more recent transplants with no claim to the history of the region. It's rooted in things like the Hamitic Hypothesis and things like that... Modern academics don't even touch these subjects anymore... It was just an embarrassing period in Western academia that we'd all just like to forget about, but one way or the other, inadvertently, and often indirectly, still influence modern historical narratives, especially outside of specialist circles, in the general histories. 

By the way, the biblical Cush is also clearly associated with the historical Kingdom of Kush in a number of verses. And medieval Hebrew oral traditions even cite Meroë as the capital of this Kushite Kingdom (which Moses supposedly ruled for some time, following an Egyptian military expedition he led, even marrying a Kushite princess, according to these traditions). 

[Nescio]

3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

You'll probably find this an interesting read: the entry for Meroitic in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology by Claude Rilly: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3128r3sw

He has written a number of books on the subject that go into much greater detail, if you're interested (though I've only read excerpts myself)

Of course languages aren't just deciphered/translated and classified using bilingual texts. When available, they are the holy grail for translations, sure, but they are not common. Other approaches are required to help translate and classify Meroitic, which have focussed on comparative methods.

True, I know and I'm not disputing that. From page 2 of that encyclopedia entry, though:

The Meroitic language is only superficially known, although both of its scripts (explained below) were deciphered a hundred years ago by the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith. The reason for our poor knowledge of the language is the lack of bilingual texts and, until recently, the isolated position of Meroitic among the African languages. Since Griffith’s time, nearly all progress toward the translation of the texts was made through the painstaking procedures of the “philological method.” This approach takes the rare known elements of texts (e.g., Egyptian loanwords, divine and royal names, words understood through their iconographic context) and attempts, through guesswork, to derive the meaning of the neighboring elements. Using this method, Griffith was able to establish approximate translations of the standard funerary texts, which are very numerous and highly stereotyped (Griffith 1911). In contrast, the royal texts include narratives that naturally utilize a richer vocabulary and possess more varied syntactic structures. For this reason, only rare stereotyped passages, such as initial royal protocols and lists of enemies killed in battle and of captured women and livestock, can be even partially understood.

Presently, no more than a hundred words can be translated with some certainty.

Also see https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mero1237

3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

Sure, but not entirely relevant here. We're talking about Eastern Sudanic Languages here.

While the case for Eastern Sudanic (or at least its Northern subgroup) is better, what you wrote and what I responded to was:

10 hours ago, Sundiata said:

Kushites spoke a branch of proto-Nilo-Saharan.

I'm certainly not arguing Meroitic is a Cushitic or Afroasiatic language. I'm merely urging caution with stating as a fact a poorly understood language belongs to a poorly understood language family.

3 hours ago, Sundiata said:

In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, scientific racism informed many academic opinions on Nile Valley history (and African history in general). The Afro-Asiatic speakers of the Eastern Deserts have skull types and hair types that led certain types of people to classify them as so-called "Caucasoids", distinct from the inherently inferior "Negroid" types. So when the true extent of Kushite civilization started to be uncovered, there were attempts to reclassify the archetype Aethiopian of Antiquity as Caucasians with darker skin. But this idea conflicts with the actual populations of the Upper Nile regions, so a convoluted explanation was fabricated, claiming that the "Caucasoids" of the Eastern Deserts were the real Kushites (hence the term "Cushitic"), while the local populations were more recent transplants with no claim to the history of the region. It's rooted in things like the Hamitic Hypothesis and things like that... Modern academics don't even touch these subjects anymore... It was just an embarrassing period in Western academia that we'd all just like to forget about, but one way or the other, inadvertently, and often indirectly, still influence modern historical narratives, especially outside of specialist circles, in the general histories.

It's even worse than that: while scientific racism is no longer acceptable, ordinary people have internalized racial concepts, and millions nowadays self-identify as “black” or “white”.

[av93]

TL DR, you need my help to change it? Sorry didn't read until now

[Sundiata]

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

True, I know and I'm not disputing that. From page 2 of that encyclopedia entry, though:

The Meroitic language is only superficially known, although both of its scripts (explained below) were deciphered a hundred years ago by the British Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith. The reason for our poor knowledge of the language is the lack of bilingual texts and, until recently, the isolated position of Meroitic among the African languages. Since Griffith’s time, nearly all progress toward the translation of the texts was made through the painstaking procedures of the “philological method.” This approach takes the rare known elements of texts (e.g., Egyptian loanwords, divine and royal names, words understood through their iconographic context) and attempts, through guesswork, to derive the meaning of the neighboring elements. Using this method, Griffith was able to establish approximate translations of the standard funerary texts, which are very numerous and highly stereotyped (Griffith 1911). In contrast, the royal texts include narratives that naturally utilize a richer vocabulary and possess more varied syntactic structures. For this reason, only rare stereotyped passages, such as initial royal protocols and lists of enemies killed in battle and of captured women and livestock, can be even partially understood.

Presently, no more than a hundred words can be translated with some certainty.

Yes, I did read my own source before sharing it here  . I'll just let people read the text themselves (in its entirety) and let them make up their own mind about it. 

 

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

Also see https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/mero1237

Yes, I did see it but didn't consider sharing it here because Tom Güldemann is not a specialist on North East African languages. He seems to be a generalist. But even though he takes quite a neutral stance in the debate, even he seems to treat Rowan more like an afterthought...

And I just read the critique by Edward Lipiński. He's a Bible scholar who's obsessively trying to relate Meroitic to Semitic. I can't recall ever seeing so many mental gymnastics in an academic paper before. Difficult to take serious... Please, feel free to read his critique and tell me what you think of it yourself:

http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.hdl_11089_4031/c/No_2_2011.87-104.pdf

 

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

I'm certainly not arguing Meroitic is a Cushitic or Afroasiatic language. I'm merely urging caution with stating as a fact a poorly understood language belongs to a poorly understood language family.

Understandable. But as I said, I'm just following Rilly on this. Not making any outlandish statements here. That's just the current state of research.  

 

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

It's even worse than that: while scientific racism is no longer acceptable, ordinary people have internalized racial concepts, and millions nowadays self-identify as “black” or “white”.

More problematic than modern identity labels is their projection onto the past. I take no issue with people labeling themselves one way or the other, but seeing history through the lens of these modern labels is highly problematic and distorts many histories in many different ways... 

[seeh]

may here is the right place to ask:

whats the different between "spec" and "spy"? are both just "observer"?

[Stan`]

6 minutes ago, seeh said:

may here is the right place to ask:

whats the different between "spec" and "spy"? are both just "observer"?

Spy (plural spies) is a tech you can use to make your enemy units bribable revealing what they see.

[seeh]

4 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Spy (plural spies) is a tech you can use to make your enemy units bribable revealing what they see.

ah ok. i often use 'spec' if i jouning a TG for just looking. Some ask me what that means and i describe  me then as obsorver or spy. So its better to say spy? Some says spec. I read that sometimes in the chats

Edited February 27, 2021 by seeh

[Stan`]

No, for observers it's definitely spec as in spectator

[Nescio]

@Itms, when the translations from https://www.transifex.com/wildfire-games/0ad/ were last pulled for A24 (about two weeks ago), Korean was already at 100% but Chinese was below 90%, if I recall correctly. Right now Chinese is at 99.4%, a significant improvement. Since these translations are shipped separately, perhaps you could update the Chinese mod one more time?

[Itms]

I'll see if I have time for this. I'll use the po files pulled by the upcoming i18n update, which will be the most recent one using the version of the pot included in A24.

[Itms]

I finally took the time to regenerate the mods (using translations from r25014). I actually regenerated all four CJK mods, because I had forgotten the *-engine.po files in all of them

So there you go.

[Stan`]

@Yekaterina translations should be better in those.

[Lion.Kanzen]

On 14/02/2021 at 4:20 AM, Sundiata said:

Yeah, Kush with a "K", is used to refer to the ancient Kingdom of Kush, while Cushitic with a "C" refers to the Cushitic languages, spoken by non-Kushite peoples, even though both Kush and Cush obviously share the same etymology. Lay people confuse these two all the time. I don't think that the official standardizer, la RAE, is a historical source, and considering how often this stuff gets confused even in English, I'm not sure we should follow "official standardizers". When we look at the Spanish Wikipedia page for the Kingdom of Kush, we get 6 matches for "Kushita" and only one match for "Cushita" (the second match for Cushita refers to the unrelated Cushitic languages). Cushitic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages, while Kushites spoke a branch of proto-Nilo-Saharan. Using Cushita or the even rarer Cusita with a "C" even risks playing into Oromo nationalist sentiments and the likes, who like to illegitimately claim Kushite history for some ugly reason.... There's a whole, really ugly backstory for why "Cushitic" languages were named as such and it's highly inappropriate for us all to continue using that term, but these things are difficult to change once they've been coined. Either way, we should not continue associating Cushitic people with Kush proper, even if official standardizers (who know nothing of this history) say so. I know it's confusing... But it is what it is... 

 

Thanks a lot you have links for this?

[Yekaterina]

@Itms I have made corrections / improvements to your r25014 translations. Here are my edited .po files:

zh.public-tutorials.pozh.public-templates-units.pozh.public-templates-buildings.pozh.public-simulation-technologies.pozh.public-simulation-other.pozh.public-simulation-auras.pozh.public-maps.pozh.public-gui-other.pozh.public-gui-manual.pozh.public-gui-lobby.pozh.public-gui-ingame.pozh.public-gui-gamesetup.pozh.public-civilizations.po

I must say that it is not perfect yet, but should make a lot more sense compared to the previous version which got Xerxes and Spartans wrong . The hotkeys section is not translated yet because I cannot find the corresponding labels. Furthermore I found a mistake in the Tutorial: it asked me to train rams from the fortress but we all know that rams can only be trained from siege workshops in A24.

 

[Yekaterina]

The scenario editor has not been translated and I am not sure how to attach translations onto it. 

[Itms]

Hi Yekaterina, please contribute those improvements on Transifex so that they get included in A25. In the meantime, you can make a mod with your translations (you can take apart the official zh-lang mod, replace the po files and rezip it) and upload it to mod.io as an unofficial zh mod, I'll gladly sign it!

The hotkey page was not translated in A24, this has been fixed and it will be translated in A25

The Atlas editor is not translated yet (apparently we don't have a ticket on Trac for this, or I couldn't find it).

[nwtour]

On 12/12/2020 at 3:18 PM, Nescio said:

And while a significant portion of the Ukrainian population speaks Russian, I don't think they write it differently than in Russia

ru_UA non-existent language. There are no rules or books or another content on it. Last year, a law was passed prohibiting the provision of public services in (any dialects) Russian language.

So this dialect is banned in Ukraine itself. You can safely delete - Ukrainian and just Russian covers 100% of cases.