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

[Kobayashi Noritada]

From: Jens Seidel
Subject: Re: Bug#443118: hex-a-hop: [INTL:ja] Japanese translation prepared
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:06:13 +0200

> > 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.

Yes, I provide an update here.  I'll keep updating translations for
later releases.

> > 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?

Ah..., my description was a little bit confusing.  I have checked all
messages that I know how to display.  Since I've only completed 94 out
of 100 levels in the game, I cannot check some messages (e.g. the
ending messages).  Also, there are some messages I don't know how to
display.

> > 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 "  ".

Yes, I know that.  However, msgfmt warns if a translation start with
"\n" although the corresponding original text does not start with
"\n".  So, I use "  " for level names.

> > 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?

No, it is not a stupid question. :-) We use both left-to-right and
top-to-bottom formats.  Textbooks for mathematics, science,
engineering, and social studies, short messages, and reports usually
use the left-to-right format.  Newspapers, novels, and textbooks for
the Japanese language usually use the top-to-bottom format.  On the
computer screen, we usually use the left-to-right format.

There is a section about that in the Wikipedia (but with very simple
descriptions...):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system#Direction_of_writing

> > (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...

OK, I'll check out the repository.

Thanks,

-nori
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