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[Posting] PCC - Language
Thread opener
Posted Tue, 2023-03-14 08:53 GMT

Hi Does anyone know how to tell PCC to use the English language? In the configurations I have not found references. From me it always starts in Italian, but the translation is often not accurate and creates confusion for me. Giuseppe

[Posting] Re: PCC - Language
Posted Tue, 2023-03-14 17:27 GMT

Does anyone know how to tell PCC to use the English language? In the configurations I have not found references. From me it always starts in Italian, but the translation is often not accurate and creates confusion for me.

There is no configuration, because language needs to be known before the configuration file is even read.

The official solution: uncheck the "Language Support" option in the installer.

The manual solution: delete the file c:\Program Files\PCC2\resource\it.lang.

The "be the hero Gotham needs" solution: help me update the translation.

Seriously, translation is a place where everyone can help. I can provide English and German language (and some fragments of Russian from school education 25 years ago), but pretty much none of the others.

I have received language updates in the past. The Italian language file got its last update almost 14 years ago. If anyone feels like being able to spend some time on that subject, we can surely figure out a way how to make this work. Translations are possible for a large subset of the VGA Planets ecosystem, not only PCC2, but also PHost, PCC2-Web/Battle Simulator, old and new add-ons (FLAK, Starbase Reloaded, Agave Tequilana), help/documentation files for everything, etc.

--Stefan

[Posting] Re: PCC - Language
Thread opener
Posted Wed, 2023-03-15 07:38 GMT, edited Wed, 2023-03-15 07:39 GMT

Does anyone know how to tell PCC to use the English language? In the configurations I have not found references. From me it always starts in Italian, but the translation is often not accurate and creates confusion for me.

There is no configuration, because language needs to be known before the configuration file is even read.

The official solution: uncheck the "Language Support" option in the installer.

The manual solution: delete the file c:\Program Files\PCC2\resource\it.lang.

The "be the hero Gotham needs" solution: help me update the translation.

Seriously, translation is a place where everyone can help. I can provide English and German language (and some fragments of Russian from school education 25 years ago), but pretty much none of the others.

I have received language updates in the past. The Italian language file got its last update almost 14 years ago. If anyone feels like being able to spend some time on that subject, we can surely figure out a way how to make this work. Translations are possible for a large subset of the VGA Planets ecosystem, not only PCC2, but also PHost, PCC2-Web/Battle Simulator, old and new add-ons (FLAK, Starbase Reloaded, Agave Tequilana), help/documentation files for everything, etc.

--Stefan

Hi, I will use the second option to fix the problem. But I'm happy to help with translation (I've done similar things before).

Could you give me some more info on how to do it? Thank you

Giuseppe

[Posting] Re: PCC - Language
Posted Wed, 2023-03-15 20:34 GMT

But I'm happy to help with translation (I've done similar things before).

Could you give me some more info on how to do it? Thank you

Right now, the tools I have for that are aimed at programmers familiar with a Linux console, so I don't know whether that would be anything for you:

Download the PCC2 source code. The translations are in directory "po/", Italian is "po/it.po".

Right now, it contains 874 translated strings. You would update it to contain all 2600 texts by running the command "scripts/updatepo po/it.po", then edit it with a text editor to define all the translations, and then convert it into a *.lang file using "perl scripts/msgcompile.pl it".

A translation looks like this

  #: util/cmdline.cc:194
  #, c-format
  msgid "Option `%s' does not take an argument"
  msgstr "L'opzione `%s' non richiede un argomento"

The "#" lines are information, then the English text as msgid, and the translated text as msgstr.

Depending on what you can do, we might be able to find some shortcuts.

If there's more interest, my programmer brain has already used the commute time to think about making a web interface for translations, to turn translation into a distributed team effort :smile: 2600+ strings is quite some work, and then, it's only PCC2, not the others.

--Stefan

This is a testing version.
It may be incomplete, and have more bugs (or features) than the public live version at planetscentral.com.