Topic: nl: new Dutch translations

stdh wrote:

Hello fellow vertalers!

I'm quite new as a translator and recently uploaded some new strings. To discuss these I post this too large heap of text, in English because some stuff is relevant for other languages as well. Here goes:

Thanks for updating the translation

1. The strangest thing I noticed while playing: the charcoal kiln was translated as "Kolenmijn", the term for the Coal Mine. I checked other languages and found it occurs in some of them as well, probably a faulty automatic translation. We'd better take the old translation for "Charcoal Burner's House" then.

We don't use automated translations, so it looks like some translators have not done their job properly. Changing the English string won't safeguard us from bad translations. If you still remember, can you send me a private message with the languages affected, so I can have a look?

1. For "licensed" I couldn't find a nice translation, so I took "vrijgegeven" which means "released", or part by part "free[ly]" "given". Sounds apt to me.

I have found the following translations on Translatewiki: gelicenseerd, vrijgegeven, de licentie X heeft, licentie X. 3 of those were even in the same project. Seems like the Dutch translation community doesn't agree on a term here. You can also search Microsoft translations - the term appears quite often there with various translations.

1. a) For the tooltips explaining a building's production, I aimed to start them all on a lower case letter (but it seems I failed with "Niet begonnen met ..." and possibly "Schepen zijn niet bruikbaar op deze kaart!"). This is because the production substrings ("baking bread" etc.) sometimes ended up at the beginning of the phrase and sometimes in the middle, so I kept these lowercase to begin with. Now the only capital in the phrase is that of the ware produced (or not), which looks a bit silly. Maybe those phrases could be made to start with a capital (for languages that use them) in the code? But then, "iron" capitalised in Dutch is "IJzer"...

You are free to use capital or lowercase, whatever works for your language - can you make the following 3 sentence bits trigger the same word order?

• Did not start %1$s because %2$s
• Completed %1$s because %2$s
• Skipped %1$s because %2$s

If you still need the phrases with upper and lowercase variants, please let me know - I could program something. The code is not trivial though because of accented letters, so this can't happen for Build 19. I am also contemplating to give languages the option of converting ware/worker/building names to lowercase if they are not at the start of the sentence. This will take quite a bit of programming though.

1. b)In those tooltips, I did away with "the ware ‘%s’" and replaced by just "%s". Grammatically speaking that works in Dutch. (Apropos GunChleoc, when on the bug tracker I spoke of outrageous translations, I meant those tooltips which were half English half Dutch. I understand making fluent sentences with all terms in correct case etc. is a quite complex endeavour.)

Yes, it is quite complex, because every language is different. It is actually perfect to do away with "the ware" if it works for your language

1. Some terms in English I consider (somewhat) improper:
2. "planting" $something, when the farmer is clearly sowing (eg. "planting wheat", also blackroot).
3. "forging a wooden spear", I refused to take that literally, it's "een houten speer produceren" in Dutch

Whatever works and sounds good in your language! I have "making" for these

• The "shepherd" works in fixed location, contrary to my pastoral image of joining a flock in its travels. Or do I misunderstand this term?

You can translate as "Sheep Farmer" if that sounds better in your language.

• Some of the uses of "vein" are not entirely correct (granite and coal, at least i suppose so), but a "Water Vein" sounds downright weird. I translated that as "Grondwater".

This is where the term comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

Also ".. can’t find any water in his work area." sounds a bit strange (except if the carrier is indeed hewing water from amid the rocks), maybe we can make that ".. in his well"? Logically, the 'work area' in this case really belongs to the building and not to the worker.

Good point, I have opened an issue on Transifex.

• "Field (harvested)" etc., I suppose that should be "Wheat Field ($status)"? But when is this string used?

It's not visible yet. Once we expand the help further, it will appear as a unit in a list. We don't have help for tribe immovables yet.

1. Some possibly strange words I introduced (or older versions I kept):
2. "Ontmantelingswerf" for "Dismantle Site", awkward, but couldn't find anything better. According to the glossary, in some translations (including Dutch) "dismantle" was taken to be a verb.

I have "at its dismantling". Yes, that sounds good in Gaelic

1. I would prefer better terms, but can't think of any, for:
2. "Boomstam", I'm just jealous of the concise English "Log".

German is using "Stamm", would that work for Dutch?

• "Hoogoven" (for "Smelting Works"), because I'm not sure if this really qualify for this term.

German has Hochofen

The glossary on Transifex I didn't update, but I downloaded it to consult off-line. It can now be filled in almost completely, at least when there is consensus.

Until there is, you could add a note to the glossary entries stating what you want to change it to. I'd say give it a week and then go ahead with the really important terms so you will have a consistent translation for Build 19.

Charcoal Kiln I don't think changing the English name would help. But this list of languages is rather long and it seems strange for this to be a random mistake. For example Galician in build18 had "Casa do queimador de carbón" for "Charcoal Burner's House", different from the Coal Mine's name. So if translators for these languages don't correct it in time, we might want to use the translations from build 18?

This is exactly what I did The mistake happened when I restored translations for after the big string change, and some of those teams don't have enough active translators at the moment. Thanks for noticing and tracking them down.

Production tooltips I would prefer to start these with a capital as they're (almost) sentences, and I might change the word order for these three templates in order to do so, if the result sounds natural enough. Conversion of ware/worker/building names to lowercase sounds very good, that will make it look a bit less like German.

I need to fix the bugs in the new font renderer first and complete the switchover, then I can look into it.

Gender matters - new!: I had a problem with the demonstrative pronoun in "Do you really want to dismantle/destroy this %s?": in Dutch (and other languages) these are inflected for gender. I solved this by using the indefinite article which is gender neutral, resulting in the somewhat awkward "Wil je echt een %s vernietigen?" ("Do you really want to destroy [i]a[/i] %s?"). [The more I think about this the more I find grammatical gender to be a thoroughly stupid concept - good for poetry perhaps, not for 'serious' communication.]

[b]Automatic sentence generation[/b] These difficulties make me wonder... Surely some other FOSS project have similar issues, and catering to all languages is hard. Is there some "linguistic engine" we could use for all this, as a library?

Gettext doesn't support gender or case markup. The only projects that I know that support gender are OpenTTD and Wikimedia, and both are custom made.

You could go with: "Do you really want to destroy this building: %s?"

My workaround is: "Will we really destroy this: %s?"

The general solution we have used in such cases here is to translate this separately for each building - we have this for the messages that the military sites send, for example. It makes for a lot of strings to translate though.

In my language the problem is not only case and gender, but that it also depends on which sound the building's name starts with.

Dowsing Hm, to me Widelands' geologists seem too competent to be practicing this. And they don't use a silly twig, but a geologist's hammer - not sure if you can find water with one, but it does look more professional.

I'm fine with it - it's a fantasy game after all. You can of course translate it any way you like if you don't think that it sounds good

O yes, I appear twice in the contributors list, once as Steven De Herdt among the Coders, and once as stdh in Translations,. Could you change them both to "Steven De Herdt (stdh)"?

Done.

I would be surprised if that really is an anglicism. In German for example, we too have the word "lizensieren" (from "Lizenz"). It originates in Latin, so the original is far older than the modern English.

Officially there is not a dutch word "licenseren" but it is used everywhere:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=licenseren&ia=web

"Uitgegeven onder de GPL" or just "Onder de GPL" sounds OK to this non-Dutch speaker. In Gaelic, we just say "under", or "fo bhuaidh".

Inbox - how do you call the trays where you collect incoming letters as an office? You could also have a look ad the translation in Thunderbird - if there is already an established term, consistency is important to the user.

Multiplayer - I checked the translations for Battle for Wesnoth and 0 A.D., they both left it in English.