[Scummvm-devel] Improving translation support in ScummVM

[Thierry Crozat]

Le 24 juin 2010 à 22:23, Jordi Vilalta Prat a écrit :
> 
> 2010/6/24 Johannes Schickel:
>> 
>> We should at least definitely keep the language codes as internal data,
>> else it's hard to auto setup the language based on the setup locale for
>> example. What could be done on the other hand is to extract the language
>> string from the .po file in tools/po2c and store it in the same
>> structure as we also do currently with the charset. That will require
>> some perl knowledge (and I also propose to update to the development
>> po2c script, which also uses a code formatting more similar to ours),
>> but I guess that's not too hard to achieve.
> 
> I've just looked at my local changes from the last time I touched the
> translation patches (many months ago) and I see I already had this
> implemented, but I just didn't complete it since I was told po2c was
> not the way to go. I'll try to merge it with the current code, because
> it seems there have been some changes to the version I last uploaded.
> I'll have a look at the development version too.

What I had in mind was to use the Language field of the po files header and modified the po2c script to add the name to the structure that define the charset. So it seems we are all along the same line here. Since you (Jordi) have already something I will let you commit what you have :) But I will be happy to work on it if it is incomplete or to outdated to be useful.

>>> * 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")? Maybe we would have an issue with the later as it means we might need characters that are not supported by the encoding of the currently set languages (e.g. the 'ç' character for french or the cyrillic characters for Russian). Maybe we can suppose everybody will know english just well enough to find the language he wants if the list is in english.
>> 
>> I guess English would be best due to our font limitations, of course for
>> external translations we can't assume what they specify in case we do as
>> I proposed above :-).
> 
> I think the English name should always be there. An alternative could
> be showing the ASCIIfied translated name (as Max proposed) together
> with the English name. Example: "French / Francaise". Anyway, this
> should be specified by the translators.

If we take it from the po file, that will indeed be the responsibility of the translator to set it (and that way 'Francais' would be spelled correctly without an 'e' at the end :p - although the spelling is not exactly correct with only ASCII characters it is perfectly understandable). I think we should have guidelines for translators however. Using both 'ASCIIfied' native and translated name seems fine to me. I would probably put translated first however: "Francais / French". Or just the translated one "Francais".

(that was the last one... for the moment)

Thierry