I would like to volunteer as a Chinese translator

[allblue_dream]

I have been observing this game for quite a long time, since 0.83 maybe. It is a great game, and I now having a lot of fun playing it.

When I tried to introduce this game to friends, they were not very happy about the Chinese translation, and neither was I. I know that there are many lines remain untranslated, and many I find uncomfortable with, so I contacted Firen; but maybe I was a little too impatient, so I started out doing my own translation last night. I probably spent 3 hours and was 1/10 into the zh_CN.po file, not knowing there is such a thing like poEdit!

Today after browsing the forum I fear that my work last night has gone astray, since I used the po in the trunck branch, which as I understand now is not a good starting point. However, since the SVN site looks overwhelmingly complicated (at least to me), I need someone to send me the right po so I can start my work. I don't know if the Chinese translation team is up and working, since the wiki page for Chinese translations is more than half a year old; but maybe ivanovic can help me with this?

Considering the translation and revision I did last night, I think I can cover the whole zh_CN.po within a few days. And now I have poEdit

Also a little bit about myself: I am a senior university student majoring in Economics and English, and I am interested in Open Source as well as the Lord of the Rings. I find Wesnoth an excellent combination of OSS and fantasy

[Mist]

Welcome in our little society

This
http://pulsar.unizar.es/~isaac/wesnoth- ... ion=branch

is the valid source for .po files. Start with official packages for 1.2 edition, since it's under string freeze and won't change in the near future. I don't know if team Chinese is working or not, but if you can't reach them, you may probably assume they are dead and send your work directly to Ivanovic or Torangan. It can allways get reviewed/edited in the future, when chinese translation maintainer gets back online (the maintainer for my language is uried deeply under real life so I have more or less free hand )

And remember that there are two levels of initiation : first is to learn of poEdit and use it for the task, second is to know that it's good to zip .po files before sending them forwards

[allblue_dream]

My pleasure to be here

I've played with poEdit for a while, and everything is pretty much straightforward and easy.

One thing though: does the catalog has anything to do with me? I haven't figured out what it is yet, but it seems that I can do fine without it.

Else I'm starting right away.

[Mist]

No, catalog settings should be preset when starting new language translation and preserved afterwards. As far as I know you don't need and even should not touch those settings.

[vonHalenbach]

...
Today after browsing the forum I fear that my work last night has gone astray, since I used the po in the trunck branch, which as I understand now is not a good starting point. However, since the SVN site looks overwhelmingly complicated (at least to me), I need someone to send me the right po so I can start my work. I don't know if the Chinese translation team is up and working, since the wiki page for Chinese translations is more than half a year old; but maybe ivanovic can help me with this?

Considering the translation and revision I did last night, I think I can cover the whole zh_CN.po within a few days. And now I have poEdit
...

Welcome from me too.
If you have your partly translated (trunk) zh_CN.po please don't throw it away. You can use this file as katalog to translate the branch-file automaticly. It merges the exact strings into the branch translation. So your work is not wasted. In trunk i see not much stringchanges. But it is better to translate branch first.

With poedit you can use every po-file,mo-file and even rpm-files as source for automatic translations. But it would make no sense to use a translation of a drawing-program as katalog, when you want to translate a game with much dialog, like BfW.

Greetings

[torangan]

It's a rather simple implementation of translation memory. A technology which is used in professional tools to avoid repetitive works and stylistic breaks. Don't expect too much from it as the whole thing is still a field of research. But it can help you if some strings are duplicated or appear in very similiar form. In the latter case it'll propose the old translation which should only need a tiny change or in a language as different from english as chinese maybe even none at all.

If you're expecting your speed to be high - go for 1.2 as there'll most likely be a couple of releases on that one still. If a translation gets major updates that in itself will be a strong argument.

For obtaining files: take a look at gettext.wesnoth.org. At the top you can select wheter you want the stats for 1.2 or trunk. http://pulsar.unizar.es/~isaac/wesnoth- ... ion=branch shows you the stats for all chinese translation files in 1.2 (devel status, might differ from last release). The names are checkout links where you can fetch those files. The error for the man pages is to be expected since those exist only in trunk (1.3.x).

The old translators were not active for quite some time so you can simply send those files to me or Ivanovic for inclusion. Seems like you already notified the last translator so if he's still around he might join your effort or discuss stuff with you. But don't worry - language maintainer is always the person who wants the job most which is proven by doing the work. If someone isn't reachable anymore or doesn't have time and a new active translator shows up, (s)he can and should inherit the job.

[allblue_dream]

Thanks for all the tips and warm welcome! I was having fun doing the translation just now on the 1.2 po file

It will take me perhaps another day to finish off all the untranslated lines and the fuzzy lines, but I have seen mistakes in the translated lines also, so more time is still needed.

I do hope some other Chinese players can share their opinion on the translations, because some words and phrases are proven harder than normal, and I cannot guarantee that my translation is 100% understandable to someone who has not read the original English texts.

So the above paragraph servers as an ad

P.S.

Should I send the po file when I finish or should I just send it in when I fill in all the untranslated lines?

[Viliam]

Should I send the po file when I finish or should I just send it in when I fill in all the untranslated lines?

You can also send unfinished translations. This will let other people see how you progress, and it is also a backup in case something bad would happen to your disk.

[allblue_dream]

Thanks for the instructions. I've done most of what I am capable of, and that leaves me with 23 fuzzy items and 30 untranslated ones, most of which are names, or things I don't quite understand.

I am half way through checking the translated items, and am able to test it with the mo file. Since I will be busy these two days I will probably stop working on the po file temporarily. Anyone can tell me when will the next bugfix release be, so I can tune myself in to the pace of development

It's simply great to be able to work on this

[torangan]

The next development release will come very soon, for stable it'll take some more time. But just send in your files rather often, doesn't hurt. I don't mind if I get a couple of updates per week (ask Ivanovic seperatly if you want to go through him ) for one language.

[Viliam]

that leaves me with 23 fuzzy items and 30 untranslated ones, most of which are names, or things I don't quite understand.

If you don't understand anything, feel free to ask. Other translators maybe want to know the same thing, but are afraid to ask.

[allblue_dream]

If you don't understand anything, feel free to ask. Other translators maybe want to know the same thing, but are afraid to ask.

I was thinking about asking also

Here we go: (numbers referring to lines in the 1.2.4 source pot)

514 Bots

This seems to be in the credit page. Does Bots mean Computer, or AI, or something like that?


3084 Toggle player on side between human and AI player. The player/client who controls that side needs to issue this command. If you don't provide side, '1' is assumed.

Just feel that my English is not good enough... Please write this in other words...


4919 Act.
6724 Could not add socket to socket set
8666 Terms

I have no idea what these mean...


9271 resistance vs
9275 vulnerability vs

I haven't found the above pair anywhere in the game. Unfortunately I cannot understand the original cpp file which contains them. They are straightforward and understandable, but without a context it is still impossible to translate them.


9604 Init. Limit:
9608 Turn Bonus:
9612 Reservoir:
9616 Action Bonus:
9970 Unterminated [element] tag
9978 Unterminated [+element] tag
10002 Unexpected characters after variable name (expected , or =)

IIRC these are from multiplayer sections, and since my experience with multiplayer is extremely limited, I do want to know what each of these refers to.


Sometimes there are quotations in "text='Time of Day'", for example, but sometimes there aren't, as in "text=resistance". What's the difference? I don't see that they differ in gameplay so far. (See Line 2232~2238 for example.)


The Knalgan Alliance.
I know that "Knalga" is a place in Wesnoth, but does this name hold any real meaning? Or else I shall try a transliteration, mimicking the sound. But how is "Knalga" pronounced then? Like "nalga", without the K?

[allblue_dream]

There are also some technical problems associated with my translation.

It seems that after a specially tagged word, the Chinese translation will break up the line, even it is right in the middle.
I am uploading screenshots to illustrate my points, and the section in question is 1970 Recruit and Recalling:

Code: Select all

#: data/help.cfg:100
msgid "Recruiting and Recalling"
msgstr ""

#: data/help.cfg:101
msgid ""
"Each side begins with one leader in their keep. At the start of any battle, "
"and at times during it, you will need to recruit <ref>dst=units text=units</"
"ref> into your army. To recruit, you must have your leader (for instance, "
"Konrad in the Heir to the Throne campaign) on the Keep square of a "
"<ref>dst=terrain_castle text=Castle</ref>. Then you may recruit by either "
"choosing Recruit from the menu or right-clicking on a hex and selecting "
"<italic>text=Recruit</italic>. This brings up the recruit menu, which lists "
"units available for recruitment, along with their gold cost. Click on a unit "
"to see its statistics, then press the recruit button to recruit it."
msgstr ""

#: data/help.cfg:103
msgid ""
"\n"
"\n"
"If you right-clicked on a castle hex and selected recruit, the new unit will "
"appear in that square. Otherwise, it will appear in a free square near the "
"keep. You may only recruit as many units as you have free hexes in your "
"castle, and you cannot spend more gold than you actually have on recruiting."
msgstr ""

#: data/help.cfg:105
msgid ""
"\n"
"\n"
"Recruited units come with two random <ref>dst=traits text=Traits</ref> which "
"modify their statistics."
msgstr ""

You can see that right after the translation for "<ref>dst=terrain_castle text=Castle</ref>" there is a strange line break. The same thing happens to the translations for "<italic>text=Recruit</italic>" and "<ref>dst=traits text=Traits</ref>". Indeed, this almost always happens to such tagged texts.

The same problem seems to occur to Japanese translations as well (I do not have the proper font for Japanese, so some texts do not show up correctly, but this does not interfere with my points).

The Western languages seem to be alright, so I suspect that there is some mishandling of Asian languages.

[Noyga]

Here we go: (numbers referring to lines in the 1.2.4 source pot)

514 Bots

This seems to be in the credit page. Does Bots mean Computer, or AI, or something like that?

"Bot" is a short for "Robot".
If you're talking about wesbot, it is an IRC Robot (IRC is a common chat protocol).

3084 Toggle player on side between human and AI player. The player/client who controls that side needs to issue this command. If you don't provide side, '1' is assumed.

Just feel that my English is not good enough... Please write this in other words...

If mean that with the same action :
- It turn a side (ie a team) from human to AI (AI= Articficial intelligence = Robot) if the side was previously controled by a Human

- It turn a side from AI to human if the side was previously controled by an AI

9604 Init. Limit:
9608 Turn Bonus:
9612 Reservoir:
9616 Action Bonus:

Those refer to time limits.
IIRC:
- Init Limit is the amount of time you get for the first turn
- Reservoir is the maximum amount of time you can get to play your turn
- Action bonus is the amount of time you gain for some actions

9970 Unterminated [element] tag
9978 Unterminated [+element] tag
10002 Unexpected characters after variable name (expected , or =)

Those refer to WML syntax errors

The Knalgan Alliance.
I know that "Knalga" is a place in Wesnoth, but does this name hold any real meaning? Or else I shall try a transliteration, mimicking the sound. But how is "Knalga" pronounced then? Like "nalga", without the K?

As far i know it has no particular meaning... Since you're the main translator of your language you're free to choose the option you like the best.

[vonHalenbach]

You can see that right after the translation for "<ref>dst=terrain_castle text=Castle</ref>" there is a strange line break. The same thing happens to the translations for "<italic>text=Recruit</italic>" and "<ref>dst=traits text=Traits</ref>". Indeed, this almost always happens to such tagged texts.

The same problem seems to occur to Japanese translations as well (I do not have the proper font for Japanese, so some texts do not show up correctly, but this does not interfere with my points).

The Western languages seem to be alright, so I suspect that there is some mishandling of Asian languages.

I guess this is a bug of BfW with proper unicode handling. As a test, you could post this part of the translation in chinese here. we will see if our browser manages the display of these chars correctly (without linebreak).