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Author Topic: Translation styleguide ? Best practices ?  (Read 6646 times)

Offline Duke

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Translation styleguide ? Best practices ?
« on: December 11, 2013, 12:53:41 am »
I worked on the german translation a bit and found that we seem to be missing two things:

1. Translation styleguide
Let's take the word 'alien'. There is a pure german word for it, but 'alien' is also usable in german (it's a latin word anyway). I don't care much which version is chosen, but I do care that it's consistent

At least in german and french, there are two ways to translate 'you'. One evaluates to "Sir - yes - Sir", the other sounds more like "ok, Buddy". And again, I want it to be consistent.

2. Best practices guide
Example:
Someone reworked many of the english long texts (proposals etc). Changing just a few words or one sentence. I don't blame him. Instead we have to be thankful. The changes make sense and reflect the changed game mechanics. So it will happen again.
But as a consequence of his work, that msgids are marked fuzzy (german translation has nearly 200 of those).
I found it pretty annoying to compare two long translations only to find that one comma is missing.
Oc I found a way to find the missing comma much quicker ;) And I think I should describe it in the wiki.

Also I can well imagine that a merge conflict in a po-file can be desasterous. So we need to protect two translators working on the same file from it.


So my question is: Do we already have a place where we collect such rules and recommendations ?

Offline Duke

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Re: Translation styleguide ? Best practices ?
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2013, 07:57:26 pm »
Here is one method that may help many translators:
When the english original changes, especially the long texts, the message is marked 'fuzzy' in all other languages. And it's hard to find the one sentence that changed in eg. the description of the firebird.
Here's what I did:
- got a one year old version of the en.po
- loaded both that and the current en.po in my editor (C::B)
- used the editor's find cmd to find the fuzzy message in both files
- copied both messages into WinMerge and compared them

WinMerge cann well detect that one changed paragraph, sentence or sometimes even single character.

hth.