Building names in help headlines create duplicate translations of building names

[Hans Joachim Desserud]

First of all, I'd like to say the in-game help is really great and I'm really happy to see something like it finally in the game! :)

That said, I have one main complaint, and that is the headlines for the buildings. These headlines use the form "The barbarian building name", and comes in addition to "Building name". This has a couple of problems:
1. In effect, all building names need to be translated twice, once for the name on its own and one time for the headlines, which means additional work for translators.
2. It also means there might be different people at different times doing these translations, which means they might not be consistent. (I suspect this is only a question of time)

I think it would be better to split it up to something like "Barbarians: %s", building_name like has been done it other places. This way, the existing translations for building names can be reused and we only need to translate one extra string. This reduce the workload for translators and eliminate the possibility for the buildings to get different translations in different places.

At the same time, I wonder if something like "Barbarians: " or "Barbarians > " could be an alternative to "The barbarian". (This is less important though)

I also find it odd that these strings seem to be commented out (for some reason, is this intentional?), but they still appear in the pot-files?

I've skimmed most of bug 676955, and this was discussed a bit in comment #108 (and later posts) but I didn't notice any conclusions.

[Venatrix (elisabeth)]

The suggestions of Astuur had these headlines, so I put them in. Because of the window names that already contain the building’s name I commented them out (still let them in to know which building I’m working on). Unfortunately I don’t know how the .pot files are built so I wouldn’t have expected to see the comments in there.

So just ignore them at the moments…

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

>Unfortunately I don’t know how the .pot files are built so I wouldn’t have expected to see the comments in there.

I don't know the details, but utils/buildcat.py is used to generate the translation templates. I would suspect it simply looks for all translatable strings and ignore whether the lines in question are commented out or not.

>So just ignore them at the moments…
Well, when sorting https://translations.launchpad.net/widelands by status I see that Italian and German are 100% so presumably they have already translated these strings.

[SirVer (sirver)]

>I don't know the details, but utils/buildcat.py is used to generate the
>translation templates. I would suspect it simply looks for all
>translatable strings and ignore whether the lines in question are
>commented out or not.
Yes it does. It just checks for _" and _[[[ (a little more cleverness
is involved, but really not much). It especially does not strip
comments before looking for translatable strings.

[Venatrix (elisabeth)]

In this case I guess, I should delete the _ (not for build17, I suppose?)

[SirVer (sirver)]

>In this case I guess, I should delete the _ (not for build17, I
>suppose?)
I think so. Of course I could also modify the script to ignore comments
completely. But I am not sure if this would be wise, e.g. if someone is
only temporarily commented but should eventually be included it might be
cool to get translations in already.

So yes, I think it is wisest to be more explicit what should be
translated and what not. So I suggest removing the _ where appropriate.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Since we're redoing the help files anyway, we can take care of this bug there and make the translation marker disappear. IMO we should just keep them in as comments.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Foxed comments fixed in buildhelp branch

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/bug-1074353/revision/6874

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.