Bug#443118: hex-a-hop: [INTL:ja] Japanese translation prepared

[Jens Seidel]

tags 443118 + pending
thanks

On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 04:33:48AM +0900, Kobayashi Noritada wrote:
> Japanese translation (ja.po) for hex-a-hop is prepared.

Great! I committed it and will upload it probably tomorrow.

> Although only 142 out of 213 messages are translated, the translation

Do you plan to translate the remaining messages as well? Some are very
short.

> contains all of the help text, most of important information messages,
> and all of the manpage text.  Also, I have made sure that most of the
> translated messages are displayed correctly in the game screen.

Most?

> Sorry for being so late.  You know, the Japanese language is so
> different from western languages on the point that Japanese don't use
> spaces between words. 

No, I didn't know but assumed it :-)

> Since this game uses spaces in messages in a
> special way, for line breaks and paragraph breaks, I had to test and
> check the displayed messages locally before sending the translation as a
> bug report.  Also, this was the first time for me to translate a game
> and I chose terms carefully... :-)

OK. But you are free to use \n instead of "  ".

> As a translator to an exotic language, I must report some points below,
> especially as a reply to Jens's mail[1]:
> 
> (1) The leading spaces.
> 
> The leading " " of " XXX" is only used as a margin to put the message
> "XXX" away from the edge of the screen.  Splitting " XXX" into " " and
> "XXX" and marking the latter for translation may be good.  It does make
> sense.

OK. But after reading your mail it seems a hardcoded space should not be
added in general. Example: "red and blue" should not be i18n'ed into
_("red") + " " + _("and") + " " + _("blue") because the two spaces are
unwanted (and of course the word order, grammar, ... could be different).

> OTOH, the leading "  " of level names "  XXX" is used to adjust the
> vertical location of level name labels.  Since the length of the
> translated label name (and the number of required lines) is different
> between languages, inserting "  " at the head of the message or not
> should be left to translators' choice.

Right. Nevertheless this can maybe simplyfied by calculating the text
height ...

> (2) Formatting of the help page
> 
> It would be good to put some margins on both sides of the help text.

Did so.

> Also, the centering of the help text is a little bit ugly. In Japanese,
> paragraph text is usually right-aligned.

OK, I will fix it. 
A stupid question: Japanese text is written from left to right? I think
I have seen also text written from top to bottom?

> (3) Manpage encoding issue
> 
> Note that Japanese manpage use EUC-JP, not UTF-8, as its encoding so
> far.

OK. I didn't know that Japanese man pages were supported.

Feel free to test the code from svn if you want...

Thanks,
Jens