Hi, Michael!

On Wed, 2011-08-03 at 20:45 +0100, Michael Bauer wrote:
> A cheeky question this late in the process - I hadn't counted on it 
> being this tight. I'm happy to use the Scots as the primary nation for 
> gd but is there a way of making sure that the suggested place names for 
> freeciv in  Gaelic are Gaelic, not english? Or would that mess up the Scots?
> 
> Is there a fix that we could realistically implement before Tuesday?

I figure the ruleset would have to be changed for that - default names
for cities have generally not been translateable. This is an interesting
point you bring up, actually.

It's not just Gaelic, really. We do have bilingual names for various
Finnish cities due to having two official languages, and in parts of
Karelia cities have both Finnish and Russian names, etc. It would
probably make sense for the Scottish nation as well, for the cities to
go bilingual - English for those who know them by their English names
and don't understand Gaelic, and Gaelic for the Gaelic-speakers. 

This is probably not a change that will happen by Tuesday though - as
far as I know, it has no precedent and may even require additional
support in code beyond just marking the city names translateable with
macros in the rulesets. 

And it takes some planning, too - do we actually want to determine the
city translation by your general language choice and make the city names
translateable in _all_ languages (adding maybe a couple thousand new
strings for translating for every language), even though many of them
probably have only a handful of alternative names? 

Central cities in Europe may have a name in multiple European languages,
for example, but I'm pretty confident Helsinki (Helsingfors) is just
Helsinki and Oulu (Uleåborg) is just Oulu to pretty much everyone but
the nearby Swedish-speakers. We do have our own Finnish
name/translitteration for e.g. Copenhagen (Kööpenhamina), Athens
(Ateena), Berlin (Berliini), Moscow (Moskova), old Constantinople
(Konstantinopoli) and Capetown (Kapkaupunki), but not for Beijing - no
wait, we do (Beking) - but, uhm, not for Hong Kong! 

I personally wouldn't really mind the extra strings - they mostly serve
to make the statistics more ugly (until all minor city names are
cutpasted to their translation, that is ;)), but allow for considerably
more localization. And for someone playing the Scots while having the
game speak Gaelic, it might even be mildly irksome that them old English
imperialists still rule the city names despite the otherwise perfect
translation. ;) 

How about everyone else, how would you feel about translateable city
names? Also, is it a total pain code-wise or just a question of adding a
few macro brackets around a few thousand strings in the rulesets?

--Sini


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