Board Game Arena

Hmm, seeing it now, yes, the tooltips look terrible. Undone. Please keep them plural in translations, too!

quietmint wrote:This is in line with the guidelines on BGA Studio:

The BGA translation policy is to be flexible on grammar... We prefer to write "player gets 1 coin(s)" than write two versions of the same string for plural and singular - it reduces the number of strings to translate.

You may have interpreted this too strictly

This is meant only for strings where substitution is needed. Substitution should be used only when absolutely necessary, not as a general rule.

"For Early victory! ${player_name} has built all temples and towers." -> it's always temples and towers -> substitution should not be used here, as it can indeed cause trouble with plural, and also because it removes context for the translators (the meaning of "Early victory! ${player_name} has built all ${bldg_name} and ${bldg_name2}" is much less clear to translate).

In some games, we have one translation for plural and one for singular for substitution if it's needed. "1 coin(s)" is acceptable in contexts where the number changes (even if it's not perfect, since some plurals are irregular and languages like Russian have more than one plural form depending on the number; we accept this imperfection as a tradeoff in limited cases, because perfect internationalization is really hard).

So to sum it up, being flexible to reduce the number of strings to translate is good, but using substitution all the time to translate some words only once causes more problems than it's worth.

Maybe I should update the guidelines on the studio on this...

Een wrote:"For Early victory! ${player_name} has built all temples and towers." -> it's always temples and towers -> substitution should not be used here, as it can indeed cause trouble with plural, and also because it removes context for the translators (the meaning of "Early victory! ${player_name} has built all ${bldg_name} and ${bldg_name2}" is much less clear to translate).

${bldg_name} and ${bldg_name2} may be substituted by any 2 of the 3 building types.
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I suggest using the singular form for all the buildings types. (Hut, Temple, Tower) + capitalization to be in line with the rules text

And these strings:

${player_name} builds ${count} ${bldg_name}(s) on ${face_name}
${player_name} places a tile with ${face_name} and ${face_name2} on level ${z}, destroying ${count} ${bldg_name}(s)
${player_name} built all their ${bldg_name}s and ${bldg_name2}s: End of game!

N_Faker wrote: ${bldg_name} and ${bldg_name2} may be substituted by any 2 of the 3 building types.

You're right, I had forgotten about that.

But using "${bldg_name}(s)" actually works only for languages and words where plural form is a suffix, unique, and regular. Not a good practice.

Having ${bldg_name} substitute with the plural form if ${count} > 1 and the singular form otherwise would be better (but would still presume language plural form to be unique for each word; not the case for slavic languages, but the solution to this is to enable number dependent translation and the internationalization framework we are using doesn't implement it).

Een wrote:But using "${bldg_name}(s)" actually works only for languages and words where plural form is a suffix, unique, and regular. Not a good practice.

I'm aware, but it works within the limits of the provided strings for this game. The strings for this game are also very clear, and the number of strings is low. Any translator that doesn't 'google translate' should easily be able to adapt the strings to their language, if it is possible, any other languages would have this issue anyway.

No, really. For internationalization, syntax or typography should always be included in strings to translate, never concatenated programmatically. Using substitution in itself is already problematic. Concatenating syntax and substitution... that's shooting a bullet in your foot. Twice.

For the next release of Taluva, I added separate singular/plural strings for the building names. I found there are only 2 cases we need the singular name, so it was not that much extra work on development side. There will be 3 new strings for translation after the new version is published.

quietmint wrote:For the next release of Taluva, I added separate singular/plural strings for the building names. I found there are only 2 cases we need the singular name, so it was not that much extra work on development side. There will be 3 new strings for translation after the new version is published.

Thanks!

Een, I think there's a bug here? In English-to-English translation, the string "huts" has been set back to "huts" since 11/9/2018. But just now as a spectator of the game, I still see the wrong translation "hut(s)".

https://en.boardgamearena.com/?findplay ... &find=huts

Checked it out today and it's good, you must have looked at it before the daily translation update.