[Kde-games-devel] Fwd: kgoldrunner data

[Ian Wadham]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 12:06 am, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> I had a look at the KGoldrunner data files in search of hints on how to
> translate some level title.
>
Hi again, Luciano.  I guess you must be a translator.  I am the author
of KGoldrunner.  A few months ago I changed the game-data format
so that scripty can extract messages directly.  Previously I had a
parallel copy of the messages in a pseudo-program file in the /src
area, called data_messages.cpp, but that was causing a few problems.

As far as I know, the texts of the messages themselves should be
*unchanged* from KDE 3 to KDE 4 and you should have no new
translation work to do, except for a whole new game (State of Terror,
in file "game_sot.txt").  I did quite a lot of testing of the new data
format and went on the translators' list for a while to get help with it.
If the messages are *not* the same, something is going wrong and
I need to know more, so please email me details directly about that.

Re hints on translating, I would like to put some i18nc in the game-data
sometime, but I would also have to change the game-loading code (low
priority, at the moment).  For now, the only hints on level titles are what
the level looks like on the screen or how it plays.

> I have found there are a lot of messages that are marked as NOTi18n,
> which I think was a workaround to prevent messages to get included
> during a message freeze. Is it safe to remove the NOT now?
>
"NOTi18n" is deliberate.  In championship-level games the hints are
rather lengthy and I do not wish to place a burden on N translators for
the sake of levels that might have only a few players in N languages.
Also anybody who is that good a player might also understand English
well or at least have a friend who does.

The whole game-data format is a pseudo-C++ code fragment that is
acceptable to xgettext, so the messages not to be translated are placed
in function parentheses and the pseudo function-name is "NOTi18n".

> Moreover, many messages use the wrong punctuation (spaces befor ! or .),
> and I think ellipsis use too many dots.......... :)
>
> I've changed the messages on my local copy and I'd like to commit them, if
> it's actually ok to do so.
>
Please don't.  I've had this argument before.  If you do not like my
my idiosyncratic style of English, too bad.  I will defend it to the
death ..... :-) !!!!  And this *is* a game I am writing for, not a technical
document.

Actually, I cannot stop you changing the messages, but please
spare a thought for translators in other languages.  Any change to
a message is multiplied by N and creates extra work for them.  At
least, if my new game-data format is working as intended, you will
not break KGoldrunner translations world-wide in *all* languages,
as the last guy did ... :-(

Cheers, Ian W.