English text strings

[Ceres]

This was started because of this:

 

When I reviewed text strings (German translations) in Transifex (where my name is Heraklit), I stumbled over several original English text strings where I had difficulties in understanding them or some other questions. As I am not sure if/how frequently these are discussed in Transifex, I suggest doing it here in this thread. I hope that my proposal is adequate.

Since my questions about the original English text strings were triggered by my review of the German translations, some of my comments are related to these German translations. Please don't bother about the German-related stuff if you are not familiar with that language. If you like to add something on the German translations as well, you are of course cordially invited doing so as well.

Please have a look there as a start:

https://www.transifex.com/wildfire-games/0ad/translate/#de/public-gui-campaigns/324902396

If someone know how to extract selected comments from Transifex, I would be very happy to learn about it and would paste them here for an easier discussion.

Oh, and I need to mention that for a25 it's too late for text string changes now, but these could be considered with the next version.

Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts.

[Gurken Khan]

Transifex doesn't even let you look at stuff without being logged in?

[Ceres]

Oh, I did not check this sorry. Are you a user of Transifex? If not yet, would you consider registering? It makes reviewing etc. easier, but when it comes to the original English text strings, maybe it's better to discuss them here, where the developers can share there opinion.

[Salesome]

@Gurken Khan I don't think you can look at stuff without an account. I mean, if you really don't want a Transifex account, you can still browse the source on Trac (the *.po files).

@Ceres The problem with the comments is that I didn't find a way to look for them, like "show me all the strings that were commented on in the last x days". You can, however, raise an issue in Transifex. These pop up in my notifications and can be searched for. We have to try out anyway which way communication works best, be it the forum, Transifex issues, direct messages or whatever.

[Gurken Khan]

@Ceres @Salesome I might consider creating an account. I guess the .po wouldn't show me what's being discussed?

[Ceres]

I don't think so. I also find it a bit difficult using Transifex for discussions but am willing to learn and open for other places like the forum for discussion if this works better. Maybe it offers more possibilities to also discuss the English original strings that could benefit from a bit of "refreshment".

 

PS:

I just got an account on Phabricator (e.g. to help with the original strings).

Edited June 23, 2021 by Ceres

[Ceres]

@Stan`@Salesome

Can you please give me a hint how I can get a better idea where corresponding stuff is to be found in Phabricator, in Trac, and in Transifex?

 

E.g., I had a few comments in Transifex (public-gui-campaigns):

https://www.transifex.com/wildfire-games/0ad/translate/#de/public-gui-campaigns/324902396

 

I understand that text strings are to be found in Trac there:

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/l10n

But where exactly would I find e.g. the original string "Discover the new maps in Alpha 25 with a demo campaign, taking you through all of them."?

 

In Phab, is it this?

https://code.wildfiregames.com/source/0ad/browse/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/l10n/id.public-gui-campaigns.po

How could I propose changes for original text strings for future versions after alpha 25?

 

And why are text strings in Phab line-wrapped? Thus, it is often impossible to identify a string by searching for it. See e.g.:

"This map will give a rough guide for starting the game effectively.  Early "
	"in the game the most important thing is to gather resources as fast as "
	"possible so you are able to build enough troops later. Warning: This is very"
	" fast at the start, be prepared to run through the initial bit several "
	"times."

Blanks are sometimes at the end of a line, sometimes at the beginning of the next one, making it difficult to be found. I don't wand to challenge how things are done, but I would like to learn why they are done like this. So thanks a lot for you developers'/contributors' patience with me.

Edited June 23, 2021 by Ceres

[Freagarach]

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

But where exactly would I find e.g. the original string

Just above that line, there is the "#: " with the path: https://code.wildfiregames.com/source/0ad/browse/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/l10n/id.public-gui-campaigns.po$27.

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

How could I propose changes for original text strings for future versions after alpha 25?

See e.g. https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/SubmittingPatches. Basically, you install arcanist and upload a .diff-file (the difference between the source code and your modification) to Phabricator.

[Ceres]

Ok, I will try, though at the moment, I have no understanding how Arcanist and Phab etc. work together, especially under Windows 10. Are Arcanist and Phabricator mandatory to use if original text strings need to be corrected?

By the way, Transifex shows 2 flavours of the same original text string that only differ from each other by one letter (small and capitalised, respectively):

I looked also in Trac but found it there only once (in line 186):

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/l10n/id.public-gui-campaigns.po

I know that this is so minor and certainly not worth to spend time on, but nevertheless I would be grateful to get some better understanding why this is so, i.e. why Transifex shows the same text string/sentence with 2 different spellings but Trac only one.

 

[Ceres]

There a several original text strings with "run" mentioned, but I am not sure what its meaning is, i.e.:

Error loading campaign run %s\: %s.
Are you sure you want to delete run %s? This cannot be undone.
Name of selected run\:
Please enter the name of your new campaign run\:

 

Furthermore, is my understanding correct that original strings that consist of placeholders will look the same in the translated language? E.g.:

%(userDesc)s - %(templateName)s

... is exatcly the same in German? I wonder a bit about the plural "s" at the end, as that does rarely make sense in German, as only a few words in German get an "s" added to their end in their plural form (like in "Auto" => "Autos", which is "car" => "cars").

What are "userDesc" and "templateName"?

[Gurken Khan]

46 minutes ago, Ceres said:

By the way, Transifex shows 2 flavours of the same original text string that only differ from each other by one letter (small and capitalised, respectively):

 

 

They also differ by having a period at the end or not. I did not study the style-guide yet, but I'd expect rules there regarding capitalization and punctuation.

[Salesome]

Basically, strings are duplicated in the source sometimes. You need some basic text in many places and it will be always the same (e.g. "Cancel").

Transifex merges translations (not the source strings) when they are exactly identical, but if there is e.g. different capitalization in otherwise identical strings, it does not because technically, they are not the same.

If you click on one of the examples, there is a "More Info" panel. In it, you can see the exact origin of a string in the source code. One of the "no campaign selected" strings is from a Javascript file and the other is from an XML file.

IMHO, this is part of the optimization potential, because if the two strings get a unified spelling in the source code, the strings don't need to get translated twice (for all languages).

[Salesome]

On 23/06/2021 at 1:48 PM, Ceres said:

Can you please give me a hint how I can get a better idea where corresponding stuff is to be found in Phabricator, in Trac, and in Transifex?

To give you an example:

https://www.transifex.com/wildfire-games/0ad/translate/#de/public-gui-campaigns/324902396

"More Info" says it originates from "campaigns/new_maps.jsonDescription:"

You browse the source and find

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/ps/trunk/binaries/data/mods/public/campaigns/new_maps.json

Everything concerning game data is located in the "public mod", so the front part of the full source path is omitted on Transifex.

If you follow the link, you find this string. If you want to change it, you have to write a patch that changes this text in this .json-file.

Strings that are marked as translatable strings are fed into the Transifex system which processes them in a convenient way for localization. Transifex, in turn, converts the translated strings into the .po files. These are never changed manually because they get overwritten on a regular basis.

In short: you find an improvable string in Transifex, look up the source path in the "More Info" panel, look that up in trac, you write a patch in Phabricator for that file.

[Salesome]

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

There a several original text strings with "run" mentioned, but I am not sure what its meaning is

A campaign run translates exactly to German "Durchlauf". The system is that you can start a campaign several times (with different presets, difficulty whatever) at the same time. Every time you start a campaign, a separate save file is created. This is a "campaign run".

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

original strings that consist of placeholders

This is a thing for languages other than German. when you have a string that says "4 players", there might be other languages that place the number after the noun, like "players 4". German and English are so closely related that you can translate these placeholders in an identical way in almost all cases. In your example, languages might want to have a different dash character (Chinese comes to my mind).

2 hours ago, Ceres said:

I wonder a bit about the plural "s"

This is not a plural "s", it is part of the tag that is replaced in the end. You know this because replaceable tags are highlighted in colour. There is a special category for pluralized strings. They are very rare among the 0 A.D. strings, so you might not have encountered them yet.

[Ceres]

@Salesome

Thanks a lot - this is very helpful!

For the original "Error loading campaign run %s : %s ." I now changed the German text to "Fehler beim Laden des Durchlaufs %s : %s der Kampagne."

However, I still do not understand what the "%s : %s" means. 1:2, 2:3, 3:4? What exactly do the numbers left and right of the colon mean?

 

[Salesome]

I don't know, tbh.

You can look for the string ingame (it would be the campaign menu) or you look in the source code if the tag is explained in a code comment.

Maybe one of the programmers could explain the systematics behind such replacement tags. I generally view them as black boxes 

[Stan`]

That's the name of the campaign and the name of the run or vice versa. That's translated elsewhere. Well the campaign run isn't obviously since it's user specific

[Ceres]

Ok, then I shall better leave them as they are. ;)

[GunChleoc]

When I find an obvious bug in an English source string, I add an issue there. Developers can access issues a lot easier than normal comments, and resolve them when they have been fixed.

And no, comments & issues on Transifex are not part of the po files, you can only see them there.

[Stan`]

I try to look them up from time to time as well as language requests. @nwtour has done an amazing job at getting things translated. I guess the biggest translation to come would be to get atlas mo files

[Ceres]

@Stan`

How can I provide translated strings for Atlas? Or help to bring the original strings from Atlas to Transifex?

[Stan`]

Currently, you cannot. Atlas uses another GUI system, called wxwidgets which has it own format, mo files. So we need something to extract those mo files, turn them into po files get transifex to pull them, pull back the translations and then convert them back to mo files.  Not sure how hard it is, but it hasn't been attempted yet.

[Ceres]

Where is the path of the mo files? Is there some background info/definition available for them, and how they differ from the po files?

[Stan`]

1 hour ago, Ceres said:

Where is the path of the mo files? Is there some background info/definition available for them, and how they differ from the po files?

Currently we don't generate them at all.

[Ceres]

I have started a new thread for the topic "editor translations":

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/46286-editor-support-translations/

Edited July 3, 2021 by Ceres