[Translation of main mod] Help needed !

The website is now fully translated in German too Congrats to the German team!
PS: 74 translators.

Hey everyone , i'm here to help my language is arabic and i will do my best to translate it

Thank you for your support Islam! I've added you to the Arabic team! If you find something weird in the display of arabic character, please give me feedback about it and I'll try to improve that Hopefully, we will have more Arabic translators!

Islam said:

Hey everyone , i'm here to help my language is arabic and i will do my best to translate it

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Hi! Glad you can help.

I'm just impressed the username "Islam" was available... I feel like someone would have grabbed that name by now.

Afforess said:

Hi! Glad you can help.

I'm just impressed the username "Islam" was available... I feel like someone would have grabbed that name by now. [emoji38]

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Yeah, I've been impressed for the same reason. [emoji6]
Welcome aboard the translation team Islam.

Afforess said:

I'm just impressed the username "Islam" was available... I feel like someone would have grabbed that name by now.

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I have the same feeling, but it got me thinking. Plenty of usernames mean very little to other people, but calling yourself Islam and declare you want to be an Arabic translator is likely the first post which tells the most about the poster. Personally I would never pick a name like that as I would pick something neutral, which will not stand out in any way.... and then I start to code and ruins the attempt to not stand out
It's not that there is anything wrong or negative about picking Islam. It's more like regardless of how you look at it, it will always mean more to everybody than say a name like dbkblk.

I'm not sure how Arabic looks with the current code, but back when I examined how the game engine displays different languages, I did have Arabic displayed, which gives me full confidence that it either just works or can be made to work.

Hey, I want to help to translate to Brazilian Portuguese, My nickname in Transifex is Scootaloo

Hi Scootaloo! Thank you for your support! You've been added to the translation team! I have great confidence to see the game fully translated in Brazilian in the next weeks

@Afforess/45/Nighty: Sure that's quite impressive that nickname is still available in 2015 at CivFanatics but Islam sound like it's his first name before to be a religion name. Kind of lucky to be able to choose it. EDIT: Christian is also a quite common name in my country.

@Nighty: Arabic works quite good. Last time I've tried, it rendered like this:

The translations of the website have been updated today at 20:50 GMT. Thanks to the work of Majed Alotaibi from the Arabic team, the website is now available in 10 languages! Congratulations
By the way, we are at 157 translators now.

Mr. Diogo Oliveira has converted the Portuguese (Brazil) translation into Portuguese (Portugal) so the website is now available in pt_PT
Congrats!

theres isnt a portuguese (brazil) portuguese (portugal), the language now is just portuguese or portuguese (international) like the spanish, dont know why the language was "split" up into different things by all the software world when in fact is the same thing, doesnt make sense the difference I see from one or other to the point of having two versions, it doesnt justify calling it br or pt.

Brazilian and European Portuguese are very far apart—from spelling to the use of verb tenses and terminology. In many situations, the use of European Portuguese is unacceptable to Brazilians, and vice-versa.

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Source http://www.necco.ca/faq_european_brazilian_port.htm
The source goes on telling all sorts of stuff I didn't bother to read right now The point is that they are two different languages and they aren't interchangeable. Sort of like how British and American English are two different languages with different spelling and vocabulary. If you say they are sort of the same, then try this one "I need a fag and I'm willing to pay for it". In England that is asking for a cigarette. Americans would presumably not think of cigarettes when they hear that
I imagine European and Brazilian Portuguese are sort of the same. Basically the same, but totally different at the same time.

@Luziadus: As Nightinggale explained, most of Americans (the continent) variants are different from Europeans. Usually, I prefer to focus on the main language and told translators that when the main language would be finished, I would allow them to split it into a variant and to change terms accordingly. However, for pt_PT and pt_BR, the main translation group is Brazilian (we have only 1 pt_PT translator and 18 pt_BR if I remember). Thus, Phylhom, the BR manager, convinced me to split these.
Moreover, the base portuguese translation is from a Brazilian patch so pt_PT is synced from time to time from the BR translation and modified.

i know all those differences, but such differences arent enough to divide it to two versions, it just doesnt justify, usually the spanish language is for international version,what this means? the english version is from uk but the product is for america, so whats the difference on the product? regarding the portuguese language people tend to divide like there were two different languages when such are the same with spanish and mexico, uk with usa, and usually there isnt a version that is only for portugal, if it have to do with numbers then why the spanish version isnt the mexico one? in the future what will be? PT_AO? PT_MZ?

Luziadus said:

i know all those differences, but such differences arent enough to divide it to two versions, it just doesnt justify, usually the spanish language is for international version,what this means? the english version is from uk but the product is for america, so whats the difference on the product? regarding the portuguese language people tend to divide like there were two different languages when such are the same with spanish and mexico, uk with usa, and usually there isnt a version that is only for portugal, if it have to do with numbers then why the spanish version isnt the mexico one? in the future what will be? PT_AO? PT_MZ?

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Hi Luziadus!

Believe me, the differences are enough to divid it into two versions!

As I explained to dbkblk, it is possible to a Portuguese player to read and understand a text in Portuguese-BR, the opposite also happens. But is a little unconfortable to do that! At least for brazilians!

There are uncountable examples of differences. Some of it, are simple, but others would be incomprehensible for brazilian players!

Aren't you interested to join the Portuguese-PT translation team? It would be very interesting and important to us!

Phylhom said:

Hi Luziadus!

Believe me, the differences are enough to divid it into two versions!

As I explained to dbkblk, it is possible to a Portuguese player to read and understand a text in Portuguese-BR, the opposite also happens. But is a little unconfortable to do that! At least for brazilians!

There are uncountable examples of differences. Some of it, are simple, but others would be incomprehensible for brazilian players!

Aren't you interested to join the Portuguese-PT translation team? It would be very interesting and important to us!

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nop arent enough, the reason for brazilians having difficulties of reading portuguese european is due to many factors from lack of effort, lack of culture or low education, because pt from portugal is the base of brazilian culture if you dont understand it you dont understand the bases of your own culture, I admit there are different words, but even inside portugal some regions use different words for somethings, using different words doesnt mean that you have to ignore the portuguese standard - this is what should be used for every lusophone country on the internet , including brazil.

I could enjoy what i have to do and where i start?

Luziadus said:

if you dont understand it you dont understand the bases of your own culture, I admit there are different words, but even inside portugal some regions use different words for somethings, using different words doesnt mean that you have to ignore the portuguese standard - this is what should be used for every lusophone country on the internet , including brazil.

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You sound like a group of americans I once had the misfortune to encounter online (not on this forum). They flamed anything, which wasn't american enough and went as far as requesting a ban for every user using British English.

Brazilian PT is an official language and if you ask me, I would remove Portuguese from it because it causes confusion like this. Nobody calls English for Norse even though it is essential Norse full of loan words from French and Latin. I see no reason for not accepting that a language can fork into multiple languages.

However you do point out an interesting "issue". Languages, which are very similar, but not identical. It makes me wonder if it would make sense to add that if pt_PT has a blank string, it would use the pt_BR string and vice versa. That way translators can concentrate of the lines where they differ and don't have to do twice the work. On the other hand it could be a bad idea as a proper translation would require the translators to review all strings anyway.

Hey dbkblk!
This project looks great, congrats
I'm really curious, in the end how did you solve special characters for hungarian, polish, russian, etc? With the trick in the gamefont file?

PS: acceptance of translators doesn't seem to be automatic

Hey !
You're right, the acceptance isn't automatic but I always keep an eye on it and you're in now!
We are 4 main devs in the project, but Afforess and I are less active these last weeks.

About the translation, basically, Nightinggale and I found that the character display is based on the windows main encoding. Western european PC are using ISO-8859-1 so when you call a char., Windows is looking for the char number (for example #235) and display it. If you are using another encoding, like ISO-8859-2, some char. have a different code, so the same character number will call another letter.
To fix that, we have encoded all the game files in UTF8 (but the game engine doesn't support it) and convert on-the-fly all the chars with the currently used encoding in Windows. First, it has created some problems with parts of the game (city billboard and signs displays) but we have found workarounds. The only limitation, is that you need to make sure that windows is using the same encoding as the language you want to play. That said, hungarians players mostly use hungarian windows (or english but with the same encoding as hungarian).
If you want more detail, read the development thread here (it starts at page 2 or 3): http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=527371

Now, we support a lot more languages like hungarian, russian, japanese, chinese...

By the way, welcome in the translation team

Thanks for the quick answer

First, it has created some problems with parts of the game (city billboard and signs displays) but we have found workarounds.

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Yeah, I had the same problem too
I used to have russian language enabled in RFC Europe, with the gamefont workaround
In the end I removed it, exactly because those problems on the city billboard and sign displays
How exactly did you guys manage to solve those?

The only limitation, is that you need to make sure that windows is using the same encoding as the language you want to play. That said, hungarians players mostly use hungarian windows (or english but with the same encoding as hungarian).

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Yeah, I'm also aware about that
It's really unfortunate, but I guess it's not a problem for most users