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#1 01-05-2011 01:12:21
- Fibonacci
- Member
Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Hello.
I've been translating Wacintaki Poteto to Spanish for the last couple of weeks.
Unfortunately I found some issues on the original program, ranging from simple typos in the English strings to errors which make parts of my work impossible.
For the typos, and assorted suggestions and comments of mine, I've made a patch file for oekaki/language/english.php: http://pastebin.com/dDXiLXr5
The following are the other problems I've found, which are not entirely contained within english.php:
* Exclamation marks: In many places in WP, e.g. "Rules!", an exclamation mark is appended to the string found in the $lang array. In Spanish, unlike in English, exclamation and question marks come in pairs, so you would need to write e.g. "¡Reglas!" instead of just "Reglas!" (Spanish is alone in that respect, AFAIK). Since there is no way of knowing, when editing the language files, which strings will be appended an exclamation mark, I suggest those marks be included in the translatable strings.
* Dashes: A few strings in the control panel are created by joining two $lang strings with a dash, e.g. "Display - Mailbox". Problem is, the dash is not a valid punctuation mark in Spanish, and should be substituted by another, appropriately. Considering "Display - Registration (Required)" is already available as a full string for translation, I suggest the other strings also be included in full.
* Untranslatable strings: So far I've found the "No Title" placeholder title for new submissions, the "If you are submitting a picture or just closing the window, click OK." message displayed when one tries to quit a drawing applet, the "18+" tag for pictures, and the dates everywhere. Also, since I mentioned dates, it would be nice to be able to alter their structure: it is customary in Spanish to write the day before the month.
* Half-translatable strings: There is a string on the "Edit Rules" page which reads "(<br /> tags required)". Only the "required" part is translatable; "tags" isn't, and even if it were, it would create an ungrammatical sentence in Spanish. I suggest the string be available for translation in full.
Aside from these issues, the translation is basically complete. I've worked on it specially to prepare an Oekaki for the Colombian furry community. It's great to know a fellow furry has developed this platform, and I expect to help with whatever I can.
The aforementioned Oekaki is located here: http://oekaki.colombiafur.com/, and the Colombiafur site is located here: http://www.colombiafur.com
I'll appreciate any help given. Thanks in advance :3
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#2 01-05-2011 03:23:23
- Waccoon
- Administrator
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Wow, it's been a long time since I've gone through the English file, and most of it is still unedited from the original OekakiPoteto! For the most part, I've just been adding to the file, and, yes, there's a lot of piecemeal translations and words with double meanings.
Now that my new language translator code is implemented, I think it's time to take another good look at the language resource files.
Also, I've been aware of the various problems for a while, especially with punctuation. In particular, there's a lot of colons that shouldn't be in the code files. I've been reluctant to change them, because for some reason, my text editor keeps butchering the Chinese translations. My editor is compatible with UTF-8, but the Chinese Traditional file is in BIG-5 encoding. I have to be very careful when editing the Chinese files to make sure I don't break them, because if they do break, the effect isn't always immediately noticeable. I've had a couple of releases of Wacintaki where the Chinese files were completely corrupt.
The dates are easy to convert, because date formats are already abstracted in the boot code. All I'd have to do is move the date format strings to the language file. The day of the week is trickier, though, because PHP generates the words Sunday through Saturday. I'm not sure a substitution method would be a good idea, so I might have to write my own date() function to make translations work right. It might end up being more work than it's worth, but I'll look into it.
Thanks for the corrections to the English file, and your new Spanish translation. I'll take a closer look at those tomorrow.
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#3 01-05-2011 17:57:52
- Fibonacci
- Member
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Off topic: It appears the traditional Chinese translation is corrupt - or rather, the string $lang['cfg_comments'] on said translation. After deleting it, my editor was able to open the whole file as Big5, which had been previously impossible.
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#4 01-06-2011 00:21:43
- Waccoon
- Administrator
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
I think I'll have to learn a bit more about BIG-5 encoding. I know how UNICODE-16le and UTF-8 work (and how some editors apparently only support the 3-byte mode). I don't know much about anything else. From what I can tell, though, the value of $lang['cfg_comments'] hasn't changed since Kevin gave me the original traditional Chinese translation back in 2009.
I'm about 25% done with the language overhaul, and I'm finding all kinds of stupid things left over from the last major re-translation during the development of 1.3.0. I'm updating everything to the new translator model (the t() and tt() functions), and I'm blocking the language so it will be possible to make translations for languages read from right to left. The functions file will need the most work, due to all the error reporting and e-mail messages. Currently, those are a real mess of concatenations.
Other than the FAQ, I probably won't need you to re-translate any of the Spanish, but I'll keep you informed.
Thanks again for all your help!
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#5 01-06-2011 01:03:31
- Fibonacci
- Member
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Well, it looks corrupted on the Edit Profile page, too - so perhaps it was corrupted from the beginning?
Also, I think I can see what you mean with the concatenations everywhere - they seem to force an English sentence structure upon translated sentence fragments.
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#6 01-06-2011 04:35:32
- Waccoon
- Administrator
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Oh, wait... I fixed 'cfg_comments'. It got corrupt when I had to remove the copyright symbol in the header of the language file, to fix a syntax problem with PHP. I thought the corruption happened much later, when I reformatted the language files to use the $lang array. For some odd reason, only that one variable got corrupt.
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#7 01-07-2011 15:40:23
- Fibonacci
- Member
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
I've found another problem: the reusing of strings - namely, of $lang['word_none'].
Spanish is a language with grammatical gender, and thus "none" can be translated as "ninguno" or "ninguna", depending on the gender of the noun it refers to. Given that avatars are masculine and thumbnails are feminine (in Spanish of course), the same string cannot be used for both cases.
The obvious solution would be creating another string and using one or the other accordingly. Unfortunately, if WP were ever translated to another language with grammatical gender, those strings would need to be rearranged, since gender is different in each language. So I don't know what the best solution would be.
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#8 01-07-2011 17:11:02
- Waccoon
- Administrator
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Context is a big problem, and this was brought to my attention by someone interested in doing a German language pack, because German words tend to "run-into" each other and change meaning depending on where they are used. The only solution is the same thing that most other projects do: have a separate language file for each script.
Splitting up the language file introduces a lot of other issues, mostly related to project packaging and version control. It's only something I'd consider if I move Wacintaki to a modular template system. I only intend to do that with Wacintaki 2.0.
For the time being, if you could highlight a few more of these gender/context issues, I'll split up those common words.
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#9 01-08-2011 03:27:40
- Fibonacci
- Member
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
Here are a few more I could find:
When changing a member's admin rank, there's the thing with "None" again. "Rank" is masculine in Spanish.
On the page header, you have word_edit + word_rules, instead of editrul. The latter would be preferred because of context.
The string word_registered is used in chat.php, massmail.php, and addusr.php. In Spanish its correct translation would depend not only on gender but on number (singular "inscrito" vs. plural "inscritos"), which differs between those three pages.
On massmail.php, on the drop-down menu for the recipients of the message, the last four options are phrased as "Flag: someflag", which sounds too terse in Spanish (not to mention ungrammatical). A different phrasing would be preferred.
On that same page, on the count of registered members, the serial comma is incorrect in Spanish.
On the control panel, first section, "Send E-mails" settings, the phrasing is inconsistent: "Only if important" on the drop-down menu vs. just "Important" on the explanation below. This hinders translation.
On the diagnostics page, most (but not all) of the strings are untranslatable - including "yes", and the "x seconds (~ y days)" way of presenting Cookie life doesn't look right in Spanish.
On the edit notice page, there's the same thing about "<br /> tags required" I mentioned on my first post, only this time "tags" is translatable. Even then, "required" can be translated in one of FOUR ways depending on the gender and the number of the noun it refers to. More context would be nice.
That would be all for now.
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#10 01-16-2011 09:39:53
- Trunksi
- Member
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
made a translation to german on my board and I noticed some weird translations and some parts which weren't translated at all.
weird stuff:
"Edit Rules" is now: "Bearbeiten Regeln" instead of "Regeln Bearbeiten" because I couldn't translate the whole term (only the parts for it I think)
no translation:
the text in the "Online"-window
--like "View", "Draw Screen"
Diagnostics-Window
-- DB Info ("Total pics", "Current picture number" and so on in this part)
-- Pictures folder < also wasn't translated ('Folder", "Total files" and so on in this part)
unsure:
some parts of the FAQ-part in the translation won't show up on the board
but I think this might just be deactivated and that's why
that are the parts I currently remember (I should write them down X.x so I wouldn't forget anything)
oh and one more thing
while translating I noticed a small typing error
__
//Administrator
$lang['type_admin'] = "Adminstrator";
___ the "i" is missing > "Admin_strator" isn't it? ( _ = place for the "i")
(I'm not sure since I always thought the word would really be "Adminstrator" since someone told me there have to be a second "i"...)
If some of these just happened because I overread the part in the translation file...I'd like to say sorry
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#12 01-16-2011 15:52:27
- Waccoon
- Administrator
Re: Corrections to Wacintaki Poteto English strings
@Trunski: Awesome! I'm half German, so I've been wanting a German translation for a while. Please do send what you have to my e-mail address and I'll take a look at it. Make sure to put it into a ZIP/GunZIP/7z archive file first. My e-mail server doesn't like to receive raw PHP files.
made a translation to german on my board and I noticed some weird translations and some parts which weren't translated at all.
It's been several years since I put serious work into language translation. Many parts still weren't translatable, though this has largely been corrected in the last couple of weeks thanks to Fibonacci's efforts with his Spanish translation.
Sentence structure has been massively improved. In the old board, many strings were strung together to make a sentence. In the new board, sentences and paragraphs are in the form of one string that supports substitution. Number usage, plurals, and proper date formats have been added, though punctuation still needs some work.
I'm finalizing the language file format now, so if you'd like to send me what you have, I can splice it into the new language file format and send it back to you for review. Some things will have to be re-translated, and there's many new English phrases that will need attention (I'm guessing around 200 or so). Most of it will just be editing, though.
There is a technical issue with the online list that made it difficult to translate properly. However, since the online list is "disposable" and automatically rebuilds every 15 minutes, it would be easy for me to fix it. I'll work on that today.
some parts of the FAQ-part in the translation won't show up on the board but I think this might just be deactivated and that's why
The FAQ is a problem because of how the code processes the translation, and because it's years out of date. Most of the FAQ questions actually need to be removed. For now, I'm fixing up some issues with 1.5.6 so I can get a beta test release done, so people can test the new language translations. When the beta is available, I'll start rewriting the FAQ. The FAQ has a bunch of issues that I would like to test separately.
oh and one more thing while translating I noticed a small typing error
Oh, there were plenty of spelling mistakes in the English file ("recieving", "Defualt"). Most of the text was unmodified from the original OekakiPoteto. I've done a lot of work to the code over the last 6+ years, but not much has been done to the language files.
Thanks for your hard work!
PS - I got your e-mail about Shi-Painter. I'll answer that now.
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