Easier contact with developers?

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alzen
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Joined: 2008-02-28
Posts: 93

Hello, I was the first Polish translator here. There were 2 others after I quit translating the game and about 3 months ago I updated the menu translation, removed all stupid messages during the game(seriously, who did that?) and adjusted weapon descriptions in the weapon menu during the game(manual line breaking rocks Wink Smiley) - a pain in the ass but it looks good now.

I stopped for a few months as I was too busy at work. I've just noticed that I lost some of my work so I'm doing some part of translation again.

What I want to show you all guys, that I did a maybe not a huge amount of work but I did a lot. I fixed stupid translations, fixed translations too long to look good in the main menu. In short - fixed a lot that got poorly translated by a few teenagers as I suppose.

And here is the problem, how can I be sure that that situation doesn't happen again? I mean, is there a chance that I can be the main translator of the game and anyone who wants to change anything in Polish translation will get suggestion to contact me instead of getting his translations included into sources? If it doesn't work like that I see no point in doing that.

Also, can I get some contact to developer who can update files I get ready instead of waiting for someone on IRC? I don't want to be rude but while having a family, full time job and everyday life I cannot wait a few hours for someone to answer. Just an e-mail is fine for me.

Waiting for devs reply.

XMPP:alzen@jid.pl / GG: 3747253

nemo
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User offline. Last seen 22 weeks 3 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2009-01-28
Posts: 1861

Well, it's all those reasons that developers aren't as active on IRC either.
But, it's not like hanging out on IRC costs anything right? You can just check to see if you got replies, and if we happen to be at same time, communicate faster.

Last time you replied, then quit before I could get back to you. Ah well.

And yeah, been a bit too busy to check forums over the weekend.

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Wuzzy
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Joined: 2012-06-20
Posts: 1304

So … the Polish translation files are gone? Sad Smiley

By the way, you should be aware that, when you translate the game now, your translations WILL be outdated with the next release. Before a release, there will usually a “string freeze” which is a promise not to change any strings before release. Usually the developers will be much more accepting of translations while in a string freeze.
And I think it would also be in your best interest to wait for the next string freeze first. Unless you LOVE to repeat some of your work. Big Grin

But for now, I suggest you just wait for the next string freeze, then start translating.

But I think the engine strings (captions and weapon descriptions should be relatively “safe” to be translated. Those rarely change. But I suggest to re-check all these texts in the next string freeze, just in case. But if you have some translation files lying around, just post them here, and I see what I can do. Just make sure it also works in the developer version (if you can check it).

But I think the REAL problem is that there is currently no easy way to submit translations. A successful approach I have been seeing in many free software games was using an online translation service, such as Launchpad (don't use, it sucks!), Weblate (good), Transifex (also good).
Experience shows that free software games which make use of such a system will be much more efficiently translated. Which is kind of obvious; translators don't like to hunt after developers to merge their stuff, write pull requests, and other boring stuff.

Transifex is unique in that it does not care about the file format being used; meaning that it can potentionally use any weird file format. This would help Hedgewars a lot, I guess, since the translations are scattereed wildly in many different files with many different syntaxes. At least in theory, I don't know the inner workings of Transifex.

Hi, I am a Hedgewars developer. Smile

sheepluva
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User offline. Last seen 2 weeks 4 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2009-07-18
Posts: 563

Also we have a dev-mailing list!

https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/hedgewars-dev

Responds time on that one may vary too though.

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