A question about translation

[ShaiShap]

Hello all,

A few days ago I downloaded STK for the first time, and loved it. Really excellent game, and one of the most polished in the open-source world.

However, it had one obvious problem - my system default language is Hebrew, so the game loaded with the Hebrew version (which almost no software has, so that's already impressive ), and I'd say that the translation is quite broken. Anything from constant violations of the style guidelines linked in your launchpad page, all the way to some cases of blatant machine translation. And for a little icing on the cake, the name "SuperTuxKart" is inconsistently spelled .

I'd love to help improving it myself, and I read the translation part in your contributor's guide, but something is not quite clear to me - it explains well all the technical details of translating, but not the social details - how do I start modifying an existing translation? It seems awfully impolite to just go and change other people's work. Is there anyone in charge of each translation, maybe some place where the translation's details can be discussed?

[Auria]

Hi,

we usually don't have enough contributors to make this a real issue, so we don't have an official mechanism in place to deal with that

However, by looking at https://translations.launchpad.net/stk/ ... e/+details , you can see that the primary creator of the translation is Jorge Mariano, so you can drop him a line to explain what you are doing.

In general, people just improve translations without asking where they feel there is room for improvement, and most teams do not consider that impolite if you provide high-quality translations. But yes you can contact Jorge to coordinate the Hebrew team

[Arthur]

Edit: Ah, Auria posted while I was writing this. Listen to her, she has good advice.

Welcome, and thanks for the praise.

Now I am not one of the project leaders, and thus you can take my opinions with a grain of salt. But I'd say that it is somewhat up to a new translator to either just change things around and then possibly get shouted at by the previous translator, or send the previous translator a message through the Launchpad system and explain why you want to change large parts of the current translation. Also you could take into consideration the amount of time that has gone by since the translation was last worked on. If it's very outdated, you can perhaps assume that the previous translator may have left the translation and is not interested in maintaining it any further.

In your case, where the translation is obviously very broken, I'd say you should just fix things if you want to. If there's any conflict you have the language on your side, and thus have more weight to (politely) throw around.

[ShaiShap]

Thank you for your quick responses - I talked to Jorge Mariano, and I'm starting to work on improving the translation.

One thing is still confusing me a little - your translation instructions document seems to imply that after joining the Launchpad Translators group I'll be able to translate directly, rather than just making suggestions. I joined, but still I see only an option for suggesting. Am I missing something, or doing something wrong?

[mjminfo]

like I mentioned to Shai, the actual translation was done by multiple people and all contributions are welcome at this stage. when we will get close to STK v1.0 then it would be more important to have a better /stricter translation. But as it is now, if we can keep the translation at 100% for each release that will be great already.

Also important is that we can always update the translation at any time and contribute as much as we can. the more contributions the best it gets. Open source mentality

Jorge

[Auria]

Thank you for your quick responses - I talked to Jorge Mariano, and I'm starting to work on improving the translation.

One thing is still confusing me a little - your translation instructions document seems to imply that after joining the Launchpad Translators group I'll be able to translate directly, rather than just making suggestions. I joined, but still I see only an option for suggesting. Am I missing something, or doing something wrong?

No, you need to join a group, either "launchpad translators" or "stk translators", and the latter requires manual approval. So make sure you registered to either group, and if the latter then you will need to wait for manual approval

[ShaiShap]

After a little trouble, all is well - apparently I had to join "stk-team" rather than "launchpad translators". I joined, and am now working on the translation. Thank you Auria!

Now, some questions about the translation itself:

1. In Hebrew, unlike most (maybe all?) languages you have translations for, verbs get inflected by gender. This means that a sentence like "%0 eats too much of %1's cake" should be different when %0 is Tux than when %0 is Suzanne. Right now everything is translated to the male form, which seems very unnatural when an obviously female character (not that there are many of those...) is involved. Is it possible to solve it, hopefully without adding tons of redundant strings to languages that don't need them?

2. This might sound petty, but I can't help but notice - of all the in-game strings, only two (in the English strings) end with a period - "%s is being bounced around." and "'%s' has been eliminated.". I assume this isn't intentional (I can't think of a reason for it), so I assume it would be better to translate without the periods. If it is in fact unintentional, I'd recommend removing them from the English strings as well (if only for strange people like me who notice such things...).

3. In the help and options menus, almost everything is aligned to the left, which doesn't look good in a right-to-left language. It's not very important, just something that might be nice if you have time.
(I guess that's more of a bug report or a feature request, but I didn't see in your contributor's guide how to make those)

4. This is really up to you, but the credits section is not translated - this means Hebrew speakers might not know who you are and what you did

[Auria]

Hi,

1) Hmm yeah this is right, though quite a bit of work to get working unfortunately. I'd need to check how this works in gettext, tinygettext, then Launchpad. I created a ticket : https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/super ... ticket/643 But given how much work this requires, and given that it affects few users, I unfortunately don't expect that we will work on this soon, we have a lot to do that is more important

2) Indeed, consistency would be preferable. Unfortunately now if we change the original string, we will lose all translations that currently exist if it wasn't for existing translations I'd change it but I don't want to waste translator's time with this minor change

3) I have actually tried to apply right-alignment where possible. Maybe you could post screenshots of where this is really bad so I can see what can be done

4) yeah at this time credits are just specificed in a plain text file. Adding all of it to the translation would be too much work for translators; and extracting just the right strings to be translated would be too much work for us developers if someone contributes this change I will accept it but frankly again this is something I don't intend to spend time on

[ShaiShap]

About 3 - I wouldn't call any of it "really bad", it just looks a little off. I think the most noticeable problem is with the check boxes:



Note how the check boxes (also the graphics scale and the apply button) are aligned to the left, with the text to the right of the check boxes. They should all be aligned to the right, with the text to the left of the check boxes. But really, it should probably get an extremely low priority for you.

[ShaiShap]

Well, I seem to be having some problems including an image. Here's a link to the screenshot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0d9erdowfpe02tn/STKOptions.png

[ShaiShap]

Meanwhile - the translation is complete. I tested it and I think it looks good, I'll try to get some more Hebrew speakers to try it.

[Auria]

Meanwhile - the translation is complete. I tested it and I think it looks good, I'll try to get some more Hebrew speakers to try it.

thanks