Re: First steps and a lot of questions

 Welcome!

 Some short answers that hopefully at least enable you to start looking deeper.

- German translation is currently free to take (someone else said a
couple months ago that they would be interested in working on it, but
then we've never heard from them again)
- There are multiple ways to provide the translation:
   - Some translations have write access directly to the repository to
push their translations, but we're not giving such access to newcomers
(need to gain some reputation first)
   - Just email .po files with updated translations to this list, and
some maintainer will push it in (at least before next release).
Obviously this only works as long as there's just one translator (or
coordinator) for the language, so taking one .po file does not
overwrite updates made in another
   - Github Pull Request is an option, but as with any diff -format
kind of contribution, those have the problem of easily becoming
something that does not apply cleanly (as you noted, any 'update-po'
changes the file a lot)
- Current release branch is S3_0, so that's the branch to work on if
you want your translation updates to go out to end users in coming
releases (so far 3.0.x releases have been about two months apart.
3.0.3 was released early August, so 3.0.4 is likely coming out in a
bit over month) There's alpha releases coming out from S3_1, but most
translators are not that concerned about those. Anyway, updates to
S3_0 should get propagated to later branches as well, anyway (who
exactly does that and when depends on the above mentioned way of
translator providing the updates)



 - ML

On Sun, 28 Aug 2022 at 22:07, Christian Mauderer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Hello,
>
> it seems that the German translation is a bit behind the English texts.
> Is someone currently working actively on it?
>
> If not (or if some help is needed and welcome), I would like to try my
> luck with it. I'm not sure yet how much time I can put into that or
> whether it is enough fun for me so that I'll stick to it. Maybe I'll
> jump off again in a month in case I don't like the work, but I want to
> at least give it a try. I hope that is not a problem?
>
> My mother tongue is German. As an embedded hard- and software developer
> I have to do with technical English on a daily basis (reading data
> sheets, writing mails on mailing lists, reading / writing C code and
> comments ...). In these cases, it's only necessary to write
> understandable English and not necessarily correct one. But I also read
> English books for fun so most likely I can read English a lot better
> than writing it. With that background I should hopefully be able to
> understand enough English to translate most strings.
>
> Note that I'm usually working on embedded software where i18n is not
> really a topic because there is no direct human interface (except maybe
> for a serial port that is used by a developer or admin). So I am able to
> find my way in a C file, but I never touched something with gettext.
>
> As a first test to find out how to work with it, I tried to translate a
> few strings and created a commit here:
>
>
> https://github.com/c-mauderer/freeciv/commit/6615faf8378bae24a040f3856e858a5d27b50cfc
>
> Is that the usual form or do you have some other preferred method for
> patches? Do you want pull-requests?
>
> I noted that if I do the "make update-po" like suggested in the wiki here
>
>
> https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Localization#How_to_update_your_translations
>
> I get a lot of changed line numbers and some messages that are marked as
> "fuzzy" after it. That seems hard to verify especially if I would start
> to mix it with new translations. What is the best practice for that?
> Should the changes of "make update-po" be verified by hand? Should they
> be a separate commit? Or is the usual way to mix it all together and
> hope that it works correctly?
>
> In the wiki it is also mentioned that translations shouldn't be done on
> the master branch. Which one would currently be the best one to do
> translations?
>
> Best Regards
>
> Christian
>