A proposal to reduce the work of translators

[dbkblk]

Last year, I translated around 40% of the mod in French and it was really long to do so. Now that we introduced new languages, many are starting from zero. It represents hundred hours of work to translate the game from scratch.

I was wondering if we cannot cut down the _STRATEGY tags from the game ? They are long and boring to translate (many tags inside) and they bring nearly nothing to the game. They appear at two locations:
- When a governor asks for a new building, unit or research. There is already a clear explanation of what the building, unit, research will bring to the player due to the BUG enhancements.
- At the top of a Civilopedia article. Here, they are at the top of English text entries (mostly untranslated because wayyy to long to do so).

I know what some of you will think, "he wants to remove everything". Now, think about that.
There are 1320 _STRATEGY tags currently in game. A moderatly fast translator can translate around 2/3 of them per minutes:
- 3 * 1320tags = around 8h of work. I think this is significant enough.

The other less rude solution would be to remove the display on the governor screen and to move these tags to the _PEDIA files, where nearly noone will have the time to translate this. EDIT: To add a bit more arguments, the strategy will only textually repeat what the BUG popup will clearly tell you already. If I see in the BUG popup "+1 Happyness for all the cities in the continent", I don't need a strategy text which says "Amusement Park national wonder brings happiness to whole continent.".

To me, a game available in many languages is a real token of quality.

EDIT: Just to get an idea, translate the game from scratch takes around 100h of work (without the PEDIA, of course.)

EDIT2: Another idea is to generate the strategy text automatically. A thing like (for units):
- Strong against
- Weak againt

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I'd prefer to keep them, can't we simply fall back to English? If someone is willing to translate them, why not? We're not in a hurry and while boring it can be done in moths... I vote for keeping them.

 

[dbkblk]

The point is they bring nothing to the game apart from textually repeating what the BUG popup tell you already. Currently, it already fallback to English when not translated, but that does not look like a clean solution to me.

 

[45°38'N-13°47'E]

I'm going on with Italian translation but frankly there's something that I find more time consuming but really interesting nonetheless. I'm translating greetings now and I've never seen most of them: point is that they're mostly quotations so translating them literally isn't really a good way to translate them. I've found quotations from Shakespeare, Ho Chi Minh, and others but it takes time to find a good translation done by someone else.

 

[dbkblk]

That's true that some are really hard to translate, when the English used is really literary. Can't your wife help you with this ?