Re: [Bug-freedink] translation of multiline strings

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi Roland,

On 27/01/2019 11:41, Roland Illig wrote:
> Dear FreeDink maintainers,
>
> I'm the German translator of FreeDink, and I am supposed to translate
> the following string:
>
>> only be done at the special 'Save
> This is a fragment from a title. I cannot translate the above text
> properly since I'm missing the context. Title texts should rather be
> offered to the translator as multi-line texts so that I can fill in the
> proper line breaks myself.
>
>> In this quest, saving your game can
>> only be done at the special 'Save
>> Machine'. (it hums strangely)
> Now it makes sense. Another point is that some other title could
> coincidentally reuse one of the above lines. In that case I'd have to
> translate the one line so that it fits both contexts, which makes the
> translation unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming.
>
> Please fix the program that generates the .pot files so that titles are
> kept together. On the other hand, for choices it is correct to split
> them in separate lines. Although one could argue that seeing all the
> choices as one unit also provides a nice bit of context.

Grouping the choice titles sounds like a good idea.
I don't have the time right now to implement this (cf.
src/dinkc.cpp:dinkc_get_choices() and contrib/xpot-tag.pl if interested)
and coordinate the changes (pre-release to get the translators to update
the format, etc.), but I would welcome patches to test how this works out.

Meanwhile the .pot is ordered so the strings from a choice are all grouped.
That should solve the context issue you raise - or is your translation
environment shuffling the strings somehow?
(More generally, by the way, it is best to translate the story
after/while playing the game :))

Also, when identical lines have been used with different meanings, I
used 'msgctxt' in the .pot file to distinguish them.

Cheers!
Sylvain