Well, actually I think that translating several thousands additional strings is not a trivial task (even if it's just copy/paste kind of thing). This would also create a bizzare situation when some city names are translated (like capitals and major cities that have equivalents in the traget language) and some would not (smaller towns with no equivalents in the target language). Personally, if I'm to play against the American (for example) in Polish Freeciv, I'd prefer having names like Washington and Detroit (original) rather than Waszyngton and Detroit (some translated, some original). It's just the matter of consistency.
As for the city names for non-English speaking nations, the city names could be changed in the ruleset. It actually makes more sense to have non-English city names for non-English speaking nations. On 4 August 2011 10:29, Sini Ruohomaa <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > > _______________________________________________ > Freeciv-i18n mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-i18n > -- Hubert
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