[CF List] Questions about CF 1.0.0

[Raphael Quinet]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Mark Wedel wrote:
 > This is why IMO it is better for the client (and thus the server) to
 > be able to support all the languages at the same time.  So in the
 > above case, if I'm in france, I could play on that german server and
 > say 'I want all the stuff in french', and if I'm in sweden, I can
 > say 'I want the language to be swedish'.

Agreed.

Hmmm...  But who will provide the code that translates the messages
sent from one player to another, if they come from different
countries?  :-)

 > The problem with this is keeping it up to date (ignoring the
 > technical issue of the server supporting multiple languages).
 >
 > IF someone creates a new object or map, it is unlikely that they
 > will know all the potential languages to be supported, so will only
 > do it in one.  This then means that other people have to do the
 > localization (and in fact, probably many more depending on how many
 > languages are supported), and if the person doing the French
 > localiziation leaves, then that information will likely get out of
 > date.

This is not a very big problem.  If the information gets out of date
because a translator has left, then:
1 - the problem will be detected because gettext will complain about
     the untranslated string or fuzzy matches
2 - the users will see the problem when they get an untranslated
     message
3 - one of these users will submit a patch and maybe take over the
     position left open by the previous maintainer.

Look for example at the following page.  It gives the translation
status for various parts of the GIMP 1.2:
   
     
     http://sven.gimp.org/1.2/i18n.html
     
     
There are almost 5000 strings to be translated.  Most of the common
languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, etc.)
are up-to-date.  Sometimes a translator leaves or is too busy for a
while, so the corresponding language gets out of sync for a couple of
weeks, but it does not take long before someone else steps in and
provides the missing translations.

 > One big question I have is: How important is localization?  Is this
 > just one of those wishlist things, or is this something that people
 > see as being fairly important for whatever reason?

Well, I expect that most native English speakers will think that the
localization issues are not very important.  ;-)  But people who are
less familiar with the English language (and are probably not playing
the game for the moment) would probably have a different opinion.

Although there is no way to measure this directly, I think that the
number of users of the GIMP has been multiplied by at least 3 or 4
since it is available in several languages.  Some initial effort was
needed to prepare all strings for localization (the GIMP had its own
set of problems with the external plug-ins, Script-Fu and Perl-Fu that
were not supported natively by gettext) but once that was done, it did
not take long before dozens of volunteers started to contribute their
translations in various languages.

-Raphael