My take on this: I have a similar grudge, with Catalan cities appearing in Spanish in spanish.ruleset. Of course, Michael's problem is even worse, because the cities for his nation are in English even in their own ruleset.
However, I am against localization of city names. It will be a pain for developers, a big pain for translators (2.000 new strings are discouraging for anyone, even if most are just copy-paste) and a pain for players. As a player, I prefer seeing Warszawa and Kaapstad when I play against Poles or Boers, even though both cities are usually translated in my language. Anyway, Marko's points are the best reason not to go ahead with that. I think Michael's problem is best addressed with a new nation, "scots-gaelic" or whatever, that has the same rulers and cities as the Scots, but in Gaelic. This has the upside that not only Scottish Gaelic speakers will get to see the cities' names. Anybody who plays against this nation will see them. He raises another interesting point: getting Freeciv to speak something other than English in Windows is a real pain. Your average Windows user doesn't modify environment variables, create .bat files or shortcuts to these .bat files. This is because Freeciv is really a Linux game, and in Linux, it "just works", but if we are to support Windows seriously, something should be done about it. Again, it's understandable that Michael raises the issue: his potential audience is small to begin with, but if we have to look for Scottish Gaelic speakers who run Linux, it's even worse. Perhaps the Windows version could have an additional menu to select one of the installed languages. It wouldn't hurt in Linux, either. Sometimes I have tried to play Freeciv in other languages in order to learn them, but it was too hard going against the main locale. Joan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Marko Lindqvist <[email protected]> Date: 2011/8/4 Subject: Re: [Freeciv-i18n] Translateable city names! Yarr! (Re: gd cities) To: Hubert Kowalewski <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] A couple of quick points: - Using names native for nation in ruleset make it quite impossible to play nations with different character set for us Westerners. Not many of us know Chinese characters... - Translating city names would mean that players could see same city with different name in game. That may make communication harder ("It's south from Rooma" ... "I don't see any city named Rooma") - ML _______________________________________________ Freeciv-i18n mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-i18n
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