Now I am ready to fill my promise. In attachment there is file that contains city names translated to finnish of every city of every new BTS-civilization.
I hope they are the best quality and there is no errors. I will next tell you how this is done, so anyone could be able to improve my work if needed:
- Because I lacked any advanced coding tools, there is no <Finnish> -entry for those city names that are same in finnish and in english. I noticed, that if I leave finnish text off, there is no error and game uses the first entry (which is english) of that city in every case. This saved 90% of my time. I would never have been ready if I would have written every cityname again to file. If someone has some trick to do rest of the work it would be nicer perhaps, but everything works now perfectly anyway. The trick would be only to copy the contains of <English> entry and put it to newly created <Finnish> entry to begin of entry group of every city. Surely possible to code.
- Because I off course did not have time to check every cityname from wikipedia and at least two encyclopedias and I do not know every city name that ever has existed if there is or is not a finnish translation, I did as follows. My principle was, that if the all 5 default languages (english, french, german, italian, spanish) have exactly same name for a city, that is probably the name of that city in finnish as well (that was the case of 60% of cities, so easy work). Off course there was some exeptions, I remember at least "stockholm", but I supposed that I would know the exceptions as I knew that stockholm is "tukholma".
- When city did not pass that first criteria, so name was differently written in some of default languages, I checked it from at least wikipedia and one "official" encyclopedia. Often it could also be found in Atlas (mapbook, whatever) and Google Earth. When I was unsure, I write the name down to a list, which I discuss later this topic.
- The hardest ones were cities, that have nowadays some different name, because they belong to nation that speaks different language than in the past. Most of these were cities of The Holy Roman Empire. City names are in ancient german, although many of those cities are not cities of any german speaking country (wirten, lüttich, stettin, olmütz ja breslau to be exact). I followed the example set by "great 5" (default languages) and leaved citynames to their ancient form and changed them not to correct modern form. I noticed, that french translator had very often used modern form, when german and english always used ancient form (even when city name is different in modern german or english). Not holy roman example is the capital city of Turkey, Ankara. It is in every language, except Italian, written "Angora", which I suppose is Byzantine form. So I write it "angora" in finnish as well. In same way I left Odessos as it is (nowadays Odessa) and Chandax (Heraklion) and Selymbria (Silivri).
- There was just handfull of city names that left me unsure after all checks, and I listed them: a) "Mutal" is in finnish "Tikal". Wikipedia redirects search "mutal" to site "tikal" automatically (both english and finnish wiki). Should it then be Mutal, as in english because tikal is correct modern name in english too. It is now Tikal in file.
b) I accepted "justinianopolis" as in english form. Wikipedia uses form "justinopolis" but because I found no other source using that form, I did not trust fin-wikipedia alone.
c) Two encyclopedias writes "philippopolis" in finnish as "filippopoli" but wikipedia uses many times form "filippopolis". Again I left wikipedia alone and tropped letter "s" out. So it is written like "konstantinopoli and "adrianopoli".
Huh, awfull lot of text. What I wish to gain with this is that Kahkonen (and everybody else) now knows my principles when doing this file. If principles when doing citynames to warlords and vanilla were different (if you for example decided always to use modern form) then my file (which is by the way .txt only because forum do not accept .xml files) can now be changed to follow the same principle.
I hope this english is understandable. I followed now exactly the rules of this forum and did not use finnish
