Message "We lost a %s to the ocean!" cannot easily be translated

[wl-zocker]

Split out from bug 1298011:
The text in question appears in the first Atlantean campaign, when the water begins to raise.
It causes problems in some languages because the article needs to be translated without knowing the noun (it can be any Atlantean building).
For example in German, "a" has to be translated to "ein", "eine" or "einen", depending on the gender of the noun. Other languages might need to decline the noun.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

The proper solution is probably to define which case we need after "to lose sth.", and then to add this to the translation of every Atlantean building. We would then have "We lost %s to the ocean!", where %s is "a"+noun, that has to be translated sepearately for each building. Since we can give the translators context information and support plural forms, this would be an enhancement of this system. This would also adress the issue discussed at https://wl.widelands.org/forum/topic/1449/?page=5#post-10674
An easier solution is to translate the whole string for every building (approx. 40).

[SirVer (sirver)]

Gun, how do you want that handled? I think it is feasible to just add a sentence for each building into this mission. We can check that if a building is not translated (in case a new one is added) that the mission cannot be started.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I noticed this too when doing translations lately.

Adding separate strings for each building will of course work, though I'm slightly worried making the building names translatable in another place will eventually lead to mismatch/different translations. (Which could still happen today anyways, so it's not a strong argument against this approach.) I'm curious how other games or programs deal with this problem and whether there's a better solution we could apply.

[SirVer (sirver)]

An easy fix would be to change the message to: 'We lost a building to the ocean: %s' and just show the image of the building.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

That should solve the issue. Sounds good to me. :)

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Exactly what I was thinking too - use a general string and image.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

In init.lua, I tried:

function send_building_lost_message(f)
   p1:send_message(_"Building lost!", "<rt image=image_line(tribes/atlanteans/".. f.immovable.name .."/menu.png></rt>" ..
      rt(p(
         (_"We lost a building to the ocean: %s"):format(f.immovable.descname)
      )), { field = f, popup = true }
   )
end

which results in:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'FileNotFound_error'
  what(): Could not find filename: could not find file or directory: image_line(tribes/atlanteans/fishers_house/menu.png
Aborted (core dumped)

I also tried

   p1:send_message(_"Building lost!", "<rt image=image_line(atlanteans/".. f.immovable.name .."/menu.png></rt>" ..

and

   p1:send_message(_"Building lost!", "<rt image=image_line(" .. f.immovable.name .."/menu.png></rt>" ..

Same thing.

Any idea what's wrong here?

[SirVer (sirver)]

"<rt image=image_line(tribes/atlanteans/".. f.immovable.name .."/menu.png></rt>" should be

"<rt image=" .. image_line("tribes/atlanteans/".. f.immovable.name .."/menu.png")> .. "</rt>"

or similar. image_line is a Lua function, not a function for the rich text renderer.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Duh! Fix is committed in new branch.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.