As translators no doubt know, there's a few problems with v2 of the patch format. In no particular order, I think these are the top 3:
- Common strings to multiple files require multiple translations
- Big files
- No comments
At the very least, I'm aiming to fix all of these in the v3 format. 1) is already fixed (so no more translating "Yes" hundreds of times). 3) is almost done (suggestions on syntax? Currently there's a # COMMENT block, but that's not so easy to type...). 2) isn't started, but the plan is to have a couple of user definable variables which control how much goes into each file (one to control how big something has to be to be in it's own file, and one to control how many things to put into a single 'common' file).
Now: any translators want to suggest any other features that would be nice?
If I may, I'd strongly recommend you leave an option in the Raw Patch Generator to leave the 'common strings' separate. Although concatenating them will save time and effort for translators in the short term, it also poses the risk of decreasing accuracy because you can't tell without reading the surrounding strings whether the context might work better with an unique translation.
ReplyDeleteHmm. I didn't explain it clearly, but each individual context of a string can have it's own unique translation. There will also hopefully be comments referencing other files where necessary, as well as an option to do what you say. However, I've got to point out, apart from very short (as in 2 words max) strings, I've not seen any evidence that separate translations are ever going to necessary.
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