[Kde-games-devel] Fwd: kgoldrunner data

[Luciano Montanaro]

On domenica 24 giugno 2007, Ian Wadham wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 08:05 pm, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> > > "NOTi18n" is deliberate.
> >
> > Well, I have been translating really useless messages in the past, but
> > I do not think translating these would be a waste of effort. And you
> > are wrong about the level of English uderstanding, especially if you
> > count younger people (Well, in my time, I used games as an opportunity
> > to improve my English... but then what's the point in translating the
> > game at all?).
>
> What's the point in programming a game for that matter?  The point
> is fun ... and mental exercise.  The more translations there are the
> more people have that opportunity.  And games throw up a lot of
> programming challenges.  I might go so far as to say that games
> and graphics have driven the development of the PC in the last
> 20-30 years.

Uhm, well, mine was a rethorical question... It didn't actually require an 
answer. My point is that if one wants to use KGoldrunner to learn english, 
he could use it in the English locale. Otherwise, he would be well entitled 
to a completely translated game.

So do you intend to make the messages translatable or not, in the end?

>
> > Anyway, it's up to you, but I think that marking the messages
> > as translatable would be a good move, and it would be better
> > to do it now than later in the development cycle. At worst, some
> > of the translations will be incomplete --- big deal.
>
> KGoldrunner has more message bytes than most games, so I
> feel it is grabbing more than its fair share of translators' time.  Only
> a minority of players would reach the difficult levels and then they
> might not have to ask for a hint, so I have been leaving those hints
> untranslated (i.e. I left them out of the original data_messages.cpp
> file).
>
> And I got the impression the translation teams are so competitive
> they would never just leave stuff untranslated ... :-)
>

Well, that may well be. This may be an indication that more burden is 
probably not too much. Seriously, I do not think there would be too many 
new messages to handle. Yes, they are a bit long, but I would not consider 
having them translated a wasted effort.

> > Ok, Ok, I'll leave the messages as they are. But in Italian they'll
> > lose the extra spaces. And I'm considering getting rid of the smileys
> > too! }:-)
>
> Isn't there an Italian saying about translators and traitors? :-)

None that I know of. Feel free to make one up, if you like. :)

> Seriously, please do whatever you like in Italian, as long as you
> try to preserve the intent of the original, especially the tutorials.
>

I think the translation is fine.

There is another issue: The game refers toi the "hero" as the green man, but 
current default graphics does not show green anywhere. Maybe that part 
should be changed.

Ciao,
Luciano