[Scummvm-devel] Translations of the About text in ScummVM

Thierry Crozat criezy at scummvm.org
Mon Apr 18 22:15:57 CEST 2011


Hi all,

Currently the text shown in the About... dialog in the ScummVM application is partially translated. Several translators have expressed the opinion that it should either be left untranslated or should be fully translated. The text of this dialog can be split in three parts:

1) The built-in engines and features:
Currently the titles of this part are translated (i.e. "Featured compiled in:" and "Available engines").
The content itself (e.g. "mp3", "zlib", "SCUMM", "SCI") is not translated. I don't think this is a problem.
There is also a third string currently translated: "(built on %s)"

2) The credits:
It is not translated at all. It would be easy to modify credits.pl so that the section titles and person descriptions are made translatable. However some section titles probably should not be translated (e.g. the engine names). One possibility would be to add one argument to begin_section(), e.g. "true" or "false" to know if the section title should be translated.
The paragraphs at the end (thanks to various persons and companies) should also probably be translated.

3) The GPL notice:
It is not translated currently. I don't know what is the legal implication of this notice and if we can replace the english notice with a translated one. On the gnu.org website the translated FAQ page has this notice in english which each sentenced followed by "Traduction:" (which means "translation" in French) and its french translation. The Italian page only has the notice in english and don't even translated it to Italian.

One possibility would be to always display the english sentence and if a translation is available add the translation after the english sentence. Or we could decide to replace the english notice with the translated one altogether.


So what should we do? Remove the translation for the three strings that are currently translated? Add translations for all the credits title and descriptions? Cherry pick which credits title should be translated? Add translation for the GPL notice? Should this translation replace the english text or be added after it?

Personally I get the feeling the best would be to add translations for selected credits titles and all non-empty descriptions and paragraphs, and add translation of the GPL notice in addition to the english notice.

Thierry






More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list