Translating
General Information
We use the gettext system for our translations. You don't even need to know how it works, but the link is a good reference for certain rare situations.
- Grab the latest po file for your language from our repository.
- Open it in poedit. Translate. Save.
- Submit a patch with the zipped po file as attachment.
That is the easiest and at the same time the worst way to do it. It only works if you are sure that you are the only person working on that translation. Otherwise it can produce merge conflicts and/or duplicate work.
So if you have the chance,
- use GIT to get the repository
- create git patches and submit those
- try to devide your work into logigal chunks and make separate patches
HowTos
Create a new language file
If there is no translation for your language (ufoai-xx.po, where xx is the ISO-639-2 code for your language) then you need to download ufoai.pot (means po template).
And in PoEdit there is an option to "New catalog from POT file". Select the ufoai.pot as template, set initial options, like plural rules and start translating. Save as ufoai-xx.po.
If you would like to test your translation in game (before we added it into the repository) - PoEdit can compile the po file into a mo. You'll need to copy the mo file into a specific location into the same structure other language files are stored in. - You'll need adding a new entry into the language.ufo file or create an additional language.ufo with the new entry.
When you are done (with a part) of the translation you should upload your po file as a patch to our Bug Tracker and add the language.ufo entry in description or so. You will need to register an account for the bugtracker if you haven't done it so far for this. (Also attaching file is available only after submitting a ticket.)
Dealing with many 'fuzzy' entries
When the UFO gameplay changes, many texts may need adjustments. Hopefully someone does that to the english version. If he does, all the affected texts in all the other languages will be marked as 'fuzzy'. It's very tedious to look through long fuzzy messages only to find that merely half a sentence was changed.
Here's what you can do:
- get a one year old version of the ufoai-en.po
- load both that and the current ufoai-en.po in your editor (eg. C::B)
- use the editor's find cmd to find the fuzzy message in both files
- copy both messages into WinMerge and compare them
WinMerge can well detect that one changed paragraph, sentence or sometimes even single character. Unfortunately WinMerge isn't available on Linux.
General Rules
Do not try to make the translation better than the original. Make a bug report or FR to change the original instead, so other languages can benefit from your improvements.
Language-specific Style
In probably every language there are certain recurring words and phrases that can be translated in more than one way, resulting in a slightly different tone. It is of some importance that the same way is chosen throughout UFO:AI. So translators can describe those language-related rules in the following sections. They are of course not in english.
Links
- Language codes
- Po-Files