Translation Tips and Transifex Usage Recommendations
Foremost, I recommend setting the following editor preferences
- "Enable raw editor mode" - it makes tags in square brackets visible in text as is
- "Display spaces" - in general, converting tools will restore starting/trailing spaces in translations, but spaces themselves can help you to understand the meaning of the text.
Add issue creates a comment and notifies (by email) the project owner (me) that there is an issue. So use the button
- if you need a context
- you need to unreview the translation (but, in general, such cases should be handled by a curator of your languages, given that you have a community with a curator)
and other cases where you need to attract attention of the project owner.
But overall I don't recommend to spam with issues, because it clogs email inbox, and every issue needs time to understand if it's a real issue, if I can help with it at all (for example, for most languages I cannot give you an advice how to translate given text to your language).
A simple example: "needs" can be either a plural form of a noun "need" or a 3th person of a verb "need" (someone needs something). Translation of these words can be very different.
Spaces in the text can help you:
In the first "Needs" you see a small dot, a space, which means, that to the end of this text probably will be added some other text, and probably "needs" here is a verb in a 3rd person form.
In most cases (99.99%) there shouldn't be any line breaks in text. So don't add them, including line breaks at the end of a text (it will look like some funny symbol in the game).
Example:
Click on a [C:2:0:0]Resident[C:7:0:0] to see their needs, inventory, thoughts, relations, and more.
Tags with C are changing color of the text. If you break the tag, for example, there will be missing opening or closing square brackets, the tag won't be removed from the text, at the very least it won't change text color.
In the previous example
Click on a [C:2:0:0]Resident[C:7:0:0] to see their needs, inventory, thoughts, relations, and more.
tags will be removed from the text, so spaces before and after the tags should be preserved, otherwise words will be glued together, e.g.
Click on aResidentto see their needs, inventory, thoughts, relations, and more.
- Tags are divided in parts by
:character. Don't remove parts or add extra parts. Also, don't remove square brackets. - Don't change parts written in CAPS (except STP, NP, SINGULAR, PLURAL, see below), translate only lower case parts
- Also, I don't recommend changing any number parts (unless you know what you are doing).
- Don't add extra space after
:. This won't break anything (unlike the previous points), but you'll get extra space in the resulting text.
- STP means "standard plural" (so, plural form will be created with adding "s" to the end)
So, in general you'll need to replace STP with an actual plural form in your language, e.g.:
- text:
[BP:RUA:right upper arm:STP] - translation:
[BP:RUA:right upper arm:right upper arms](in your language)
Example
[TSU_NOUN:hair:SINGULAR]
In many languages, "hair" is not singular, but plural.
In general, I recommend you to change SINGULAR and PLURAL to the actual form of the translation, so if "hair" in your language is plural, then change to PLURAL, or other way in other cases.
[ATTACK_VERB:bite:bites]
For verb tags the form with "s" is not a plural form ("multiple bites"), but a 3rd person form ("someone bites").
Unknown yet
[CDI:VERB:spit:spits:NA]
Prefstring text is a part of a phrase He likes <objects> for their <prefstring>. So prefstrings should be in the corresponding form (if this is applicable for your language).