On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 05:49:39PM +0100, Benoit Timbert wrote: > In fact, unlike 1.2 and 1.0, none of our translation teams could manage to get > 100% of the strings translated.
Tens of thousands of words of text takes several months of effort to translate. The 40,000 words (IIRC) in 1.0 were reasonably static for several months. As a result, we had 18 complete translations in 1.0.2 (again, IIRC). To go from 18 to 0 indicates that the focus of Wesnoth development has shifted away from translations to having lots of novelty instead. Moreover, some translators (me included) lost interest when campaigns with 100% translations were removed from mainline and replaced with campaigns with few translations. Gameplay quality probably improved, but a history of sidelining hundreds of hours of work is likely to make potential translators wary of contributing again, and more likely to wait until a campaign has been in the game for a long period of time, and strings have settled, before tackling its translation. So if short release cycles mean lots of campaign churn, expect reduced translation activity. One way to deal with this could be to change the expectations of translations, and to flag the translation level in-game. Just the core game elements translated: bronze standard (5 of these right now, with another 6 very easily achievable, and another 5 achievable with a bit of effort). A step beyond is a single mainline campaign completely translated; doesn't have to be the same one for every translation (silver standard, 9 of these now just based on HttT and assuming the core strings get finished, another 5 almost there). A 100% translation would then be the gold standard (none right now). Explicitly signalling the level of translation for each language using coarse grained milestones would perhaps encourage translators to reach and sustain those milestones. Seeing three hours of work translate into a 0.5% increase in strings translated at http://gettext.wesnoth.org/ isn't very motivating -- but seeing the rating for the language in the language menu go from bronze to silver might be. It might also encourage people to try out playing the game with a translation. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
