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

[Max Horn]

Am 03.05.2011 um 23:56 schrieb Thierry Crozat:

> On 2 May 2011 11:11, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Personally I rather for leaving the credits untranslated. Otherwise we
>>> might end up with missing/inconsistent (depending whether the English
>>> string would be used then or not) contribution descriptions in case
>>> they are updated.
>> 
>> I can't quite follow the logic here: Don't we risk missing/inconsistent
>> translations *everywhere* anyway? I mean, what is so special about the
>> credits that it is more likely resp. more problematic if they are only
>> partially translated? Maybe I am just missing something here?
>> 
> 
> I am on the same line here. I quite can't see why it would be more
> problematic for the credits than the rest of the software. We have to
> remember to update the scummvm.pot template file from time to time after the
> credits are changed, and merge the changes in the translation files, but
> this could be done automatically by 'make credits' for example. And
> currently the template file is not updated either when changing the source
> code...

So, if nobody objects, I'd suggest working on that. 

Doing this shouldn't be too hard, assuming we just want to translate the about dialog (if we also want translated versions of AUTHORS and the website, then we should use a different approach; but unless somebody wants to work on that right now, I suggest trying the simple approach first).

So, if we just translate the in-app about dialog, we can tweak credits.pl slightly to emit some stuff differently. Specifically, begin_section and add_paragraph should output "translatable" strings (sure, some of them don't need to be translated, like "BeOS", but translators can just leave these alone).

Here is a quick & dirty implementation:

<https://github.com/fingolfin/scummvm/compare/scummvm:master...translate-about>

One thing that needs to be resolved in there is the use of non-ASCII chars in msgids (e.g. for "Touché"). It would be no problem to generate an ASCII-only msgid, but we really want the non-ASCII version in the source, too. As far as I could tell, we have no macro in common/translation.h that can be used to specify a distinct msgid and msgstr. Or is there?

Otherwise, this seems to work well.


>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> Just my two cents. ANd I also think that if we mean this whole localization
>> business seriously, we should contemplate offering a minimal translated
>> README file for our users -- maybe no need to translate *all*, but at least
>> a minimal blurb for newbies in their mother tongue. Maybe a README.de,
>> README.fr etc. ?
>> 
> 
> I discussed that with some translators when preparing the previous release
> (1.2.0). I even made a template for translating part of the README to other
> languages with the help of Simon. If I remember correctly, the idea was to
> translate the first part (About ScummVM and Quick Start) and to add a small
> blurb mentioning the full README and ways to contact the team.

This sounds like a great thing to have, actually.

> I think we
> had a first draft of French and German translations too. I cannnot check
> right now because I am abroad this week for my work. I will try to restart
> this work and commit the files (in doc/translations/ maybe?) when I am back.
> This might be a bit late to bundle the files with the version 1.3.0, but at
> least we can add links from the web site and it will be there for future
> versions.
> 
> The problem we had was updating the template when the README itself is
> changed. However the first part of the README does not change much, so this
> should not be a big issue to do it manually.

We could even have a script that compares the template against the regular README, and reports if it notices a change. That could then be run as part of "make test" or so. 


Another thing that is currently not being translated is the output of "--help", by the way, which also would be nice to have translated.


Bye,
Max