Real-time realtime real time, really the time

[Liallan]

Opinions welcome, but would love to have a "ruling" on this by Een as to what the site prefers.

The inconsistency with real-time or real time or realtime is starting to drive me a little nuts, and I'd love to get a consistent way to write this word.

Why would I want a ruling from a non-native speaker? Well, partly because my main goal is consistency. And partly because, in the research I did, there doesn't seem to be total agreement on this. So I'm not sure how relevant that even is. (Other than to say that realtime as one word seems to not be terribly correct at the moment, and the spell checker even tags that one.)

My personal opinion is hyphenated "real-time," just because turn-based is hyphenated and I think makes a better aesthetic, and because the adjective form is more likely hyphenated, and while it's not always used as an adjective here, there is the concept of playing "real-time games." And lastly, because I think it would be seriously difficult to find the context of all of them and being consistent would be nicer.

(Sorry, just being my usual anal self. Or if no one cares, I suppose I can just tolerate it.)

[Een]

Hi Liallan,

Any one of the three looks allright for me. That being said, consistency is good, so it would indeed be better to write it always the same.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time it looks that the wikipedia crowd (that is usually pretty fussy too) prefers real-time. So I'd say go for this one

[JollyBird]

Thanks for bringing this up; consistency makes sense.

Checked some dutch translations and fixed them to "real-time".

@Lilian:
Maybe got a bit over-enthousiastic about things being consistence:
While translating to dutch noticed that some originals weren't fixed too.
Went over to english-english translation and started to fix a few.
But soon this felt not right since you brought this suggestion up and I realized (a bit too late)
that you probably hasn't seen Een's response yet.
Really don't want to take away translations you are working on; so sorry for this!

[ckwatt]

Weighing in (as I am wont to do):

I think that consistency is important, even if it is often a far-off goal. Consistency adds to the professional appearance and thus the attractiveness of the site. A sloppy looking site is less likely to win over new users (this may apply less to those of us who have been hooked for a long time, of course!)

As for this term, I strongly prefer "real-time" with a hyphen and wouldn't even take the other choices into consideration for English. Having said that, this does not necessarily apply to Dutch or any other language. Every language has its own conventions and tendencies, including what to do with loan words from English. I would say that it is best, if unsure, to see how that term or other appropriate terms are used in your language by asking others or having a look around online. It may of course not always be best to use the English loan word but to choose something else.

[Liallan]

Thanks for all the replies! And here I thought people would consider I'm too anal.

JollyBird, you didn't disrupt anything. I changed maybe two of them a couple of months ago because they were inconsistent on the same page and I happened to notice them. But I have not touched this since. I noticed again the other day because of some of the changes that have been made, so new stuff pops up all the time. (Edit: But thanks for the consideration.)

ckwatt, I think you may be misunderstanding. I had to read those last couple of sentences a few times to get what you were saying, and I finally decided you think I'm literally translating. No, I'm just fixing English. And I did spend some time online trying to figure out the "correct" version, in English.

I'm partial to the hyphenated version, and so far it seems others are as well.

[Liallan]

Here's a tricky one:

%player% invited you to play %@game_name% (%realtime%).

I don't know if it's going to print the "realtime," of if it's picking that up from somewhere else and needs to stay as is??

[Een]

Here's a tricky one:

%player% invited you to play %@game_name% (%realtime%).

I don't know if it's going to print the "realtime," of if it's picking that up from somewhere else and needs to stay as is??

From the translation guidelines:

"Strings such as ${SOMETHING}, %SOMETHING, <SOMETHING> are markup strings for formatting or substituting text and must be left as is."