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Topic: More powerful tools for grammar adherence?

Wesmania

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Joined: 2009-02-22, 19:29
Posts: 3
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Just found this site
Posted at: 2012-12-25, 21:23

I've been involved in the polish translation of Widelands for quite some time - but just recently, when I had a chance to play some Widelands, I noticed how crippling the simple, string-substitution-based translation model on Launchpad is.

It works very well when translating lengthy strings that belong to the storyline, but the logic statements are another matter. Since they're broken up in small bits, it's difficult to translate each bit so that the whole sentence put together sound right - especially in different contexts. Same thing goes for adjectives, where sometimes the same word must be applied to nouns of different gender. In other words, simply substituting the strings is awkward at least, and inadequate at most.

Since I'm not knowledgeable concerning the inner workings of WL, here goes my question: is it possible to utilize the Launchpad facilities to make translating according to different languages' grammar rules easier? Using more, but lengthier strings? Messing with the code and printf syntax? If it isn't possible, do there exist any alternatives other than hard-coding the language in?

Edited: 2012-12-25, 21:40

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Nasenbaer
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Joined: 2009-02-21, 18:17
Posts: 828
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One Elder of Players
Location: Germany
Posted at: 2012-12-26, 17:48

Hi Wesmania,

you are right. There are some strange sentences in the game, that are a result of "logical operations". This behaviour is one often mentioned bug in Widelands (take a look at it here ). From what I have read in the last months, the progress on fixing this bug seems to be quite far, so chances are high, that it gets fixed soon. face-smile.png

Edited: 2012-12-26, 17:49

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Adamant

Joined: 2012-10-11, 16:21
Posts: 180
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Widelands-Forum-Junkie
Location: Alemania
Posted at: 2013-02-23, 15:40

What way go pro-translation-sw? woko said: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_translation there are several Concepts listed. if that point is really hard at present (not in my scope as player) .. is there any simple adation possible aside from direct mapping?

hot shot from me: http://linuxgazette.net/152/oregan.html - what does it take to integrate per sw?

Edited: 2013-02-23, 15:41

Ivan the Terrible is dead .. Genghis Khan is dead .. and I do not feel well, too.

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GunChleoc
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Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
Posts: 3324
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Location: RenderedRect
Posted at: 2013-10-24, 16:42

I have done some work on these in my branch, which will be integrated sometime after the next release. It still uses the same logical structure, but I have given more control over word order by introducing more placeholders. I have also added some comments in the source code, hoping it will help tranlators with understanding the context of each string.


Busy indexing nil values

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