Internal texts with same function

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Internal texts with same function

January 23, 2009, 03:44:45 pm

Hi,

It's a bit hard to explain:

Say, we have two internal texts:

1) 8WORLD_CHOOSE, it's translated "day and night change" in "Display settings" window.

2) Toggle day/night view hasn't received English translation and I don't know where this internal text is applied.

I think I found more cases which we have pairs of internal texts that, if translated, will receive the same translation, because they have the same function.

Re: Internal texts with same function

Reply #1 – January 23, 2009, 04:16:30 pm

I have diametrically-opposed viewpoint.
I think simutrans has many catch-all messages, it is not user friendly.
I doubt that many players could understand the reason of warnings and meanings of labeled texts.

"Toggle day/night view" changes night-only-view and day-only-view manually.
It is different function from "8WORLD_CHOOSE".
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=452.0

Re: Internal texts with same function

Reply #2 – January 23, 2009, 05:59:18 pm

Igor: no. Z9999: yes.

In i18n/l10n, separating texts and adding more context to make them recognizable (for translator) is far more important than merging them to gain a few bytes of memory on convenience for some translators.

Some languages can use the same words on many places. Some do not. Which one do you prefer: less work for some and broken translations for the others, or more work and all translations possible?

I will cite (not precisely) here one statement that I found a few weeks ago in a text about building community around floss software:

Quote

If a translator says "I need more context for this message", you do it without asking, or you get no translation.

Re: Internal texts with same function

Reply #3 – January 23, 2009, 06:50:27 pm

All text objects have a field 'Note' for description.

prissi but needs some time (which he does not have) to this field for all the texts to be filled.

The translator now has various groups of texts.

message_text, button_text, climates_text, error_text, help_text, menu_text, program_text, record_text, ki_text

Unfortunately, this so far made little use.