PlaneShift.Translation project

[redhound]

Dear fellow players!

Allow me to announce that PlaneShift client UI translation files are available to translation online on Transifex.com platform!

Transifex.com platform provides translators with many nice features, such as glossary, translation history, automatic translation from translation memory and more. You really do not need to know anything about underlying technology - just ability to translate from english to your native language. If you will try it, you will love it!

If you want to contribute your translation for one of the existing languages (or request new one), you will need to:

1. Get free Transifex.com account.
2. Send me (roman.yagodin) a message with language(s) you want to translate to. I could also invite you by your email address.

Then I will assign you to the right roles and you'd be able to start translating.

I would also gladly add someone from dev. team to the project administators role with full management rights, just ask.

Now some additional details for developers.

The project on Transifex.com is backed up by PlaneShift.Translation project on GitLab.com. The project currently contains shell scripts which can be used to convert translations from 'stringtable.xml' format to 'strings.xml' format and back, and also original and converted translation files to follow changes.

Translations in 'strings.xml' format are effectively Android String Resource files. Yes, I know this is sounds strange, but nethertheless they can be directly uploaded to Transifex.com as resource files. So I've converted all translations available in the PlaneShift source code tree 'lang' folder to 'strings.xml' format and uploaded them to the Transifex.com project.

You can get updated files (with new translated strings) from Transifex.com in 'strings.xml' format, and then apply conversion script to get translations in 'stringtable.xml' format, which can be used by the PlaneShift client.

The project currently lacks of scripts to easily invoke Transifex.com client utility to manage resources from command line. I hope I could solve it in nearest future.

Note that I'm doing this primary to support and organize my work on the russian translation, but think that the instrumentation created in the process could also be useful to translate PlaneShift client to any language.

I would love to hear any questions, suggestions and critics.

[Bonifarzia]

I think this system worked pretty well for Super Tux Kart, which seems to have very broad language support. For a single-player based, kid-friendly game, this is very useful and reasonable.
For PlaneShift, I think a basic understanding of English is crucial to enjoy the game experience, so translation packages for the user interface and help menus are less important. However, since there are already some translation string tables for PS, it is probably no bad idea to set things up on transifex.
So, in case I spot any flaws with the German translations, I'd be willing to help with small corrections, but I guess that part is already fine.
EDIT: 11% complete, 834 strings left to translate?! I thought that was completed ages ago. Well, maybe I'll submit a bunch of translations later.

[redhound]

There are total 516 strings with *lots* of whitespace (empty strings) in the 'stringtable.xml' for german, so comparing with more than 900 strings in base 'strings.xml' the 11% looks OK to me. I asked LigH does he knows about more complete german translation, but he doubted it exists.

Bonifarzia, if you wish, I could send you invite letter from Transifex (please pm an email to me).

[redhound]

German, Czech and Portuguese translations updated with content from PSwiki. German translation is on 37% now (including Bonifarzia work).

I'm planning to add more languages available on PSwiki (but not in SVN) to the Transifex project in a couple of days.

[redhound]

Added new languages / translations based on PSwiki content to the translation project on Transifex. They are: Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Lithuanian, Finnish, Greek, English (Great Britain) and Portuguese (Brazil). The Portuguese (Brazil) translation looks much more complete than the Portuguese (50% vs 25%).

Some translations were updated from PSwiki content: German (already mentioned), Czech, Portuguese.

Skipped Slovak (translation on PSwiki is empty). Also skipped Leet and EspaƱol - at least until I know how to add custom language name to Transifex project... or decide to "squat" the most exotic dialect names for that rightful cause.

Currently looking for native speakers for Lemur/Kran, Enkien or any other Yliakum languages...

[GunChleoc]

I think in the long run, we would benefit from using gettext rather than a custom format. This would have the following advantages:

• Plural form support
• Translator tools
• Validation tools to catch any mistakes with printf placeholders that would make the game crash
• No need to convert formats

The string markup also needs some rework. I opened a lot of issues on Transifex to keep track of them. If I manage to compile the code, I'd be willing to take a look at this myself.

[redhound]

I think in the long run, we would benefit from using gettext rather than a custom format.

GNU gettext is cool.

And it's a pity that there are still many UI parts which not localizable - and most of them are recent additions.

[Shatterkiss]

GNU gettext is cool.

I don't know GNU, but I recall being quite fond of Gnu Gnews

[GunChleoc]

I don't know GNU

Then it's high time that we changed that: https://www.gnu.org/

There might be no PlaneShift without GNU.

[redhound]

Project status update

- Updated Russian (ru) translation (still in review): stringtable.xml
- Uploaded new Gaelic, Scottish (gd) translation (by GunChleoc): stringtable.xml

Also, GunChleoc have reported a decent amount of issues to the translation project on Transifex, which may be of interest for dev team.