[Scummvm-devel] Improving translation support in ScummVM

[Eugene Sandulenko]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:25:58 +0100
Thierry Crozat <criezy at scummvm.org> wrote:
> * Can we drop the country and just list language names (e.g.
> "Russian", "German", "French") or do we want to accept translations
> in the same language but different countries (e.g. "French (France)"
> and "French (Canada)")? I would be in favor of displaying only the
> language.
There are 2 approaches in this which I thought:
  * Have hardcoded table of id -> display language mapping
  * Abuse first translation entry and let translators specify it

> * In which language should we display the language string? Always in
> english (e.g. "English", "French", "German") or in the native
> language for that string (e.g. "English", "Français", "Deutsch")?
It has to be in one language. Whether it will be English, or currently
selected GUI language depends on decision on previous item. I believe
that easiest would be stick to English.

> Second issue: the layout is too tight and static and sometime we have
> to jump through hoops to find a translation that fits in the current
> layout (and this can result in an approximative translation).
I recommend to let languages override global theme variables. We
specify majority of widget widths there, and if not, then we need to
move them. This will give more or less clean solution.

Our current layouting code is pretty dumb in many cases, particularly
you are forced to specify fixed widths for horizontal layouts, as it
somehow cannot calculate them by itself, so letting GUI automatically
decide on widget widths will require some coding. Moreover, this may
lead to ugly cases with widgets not aligned horzontally.

Option with language-dependent full themes is a maintenance disaster,
so no.


Eugene