Re: [Stellarium-pubdevel] Suggestions and questions about the UI/translation

[Andras M. <and...@gm...>]

Thanks for changing those labels, Fabien.

"Fabien Chéreau" <fab...@go...>
wrote on Fri, 23 May 2008 09:38:29 +0200:

> > * Change "Amount" in the "Labels and Markers" box. It's too vague.
> > Amount of what?
> 
> Here I need a replacement.. I am not yet totally sure that only one
> slider is possible. What do you think?

That really depends on how important it is to control the labels
independently. One slider is enough for me, but I'm just a home
user---it might not be enough for others. One possibility is to add
more sliders, but allow the users to lock them together.

> > * Should the command line help be translated? [...]
> 
> Here I have no strong opinions.. Most win/mac users will never use
> command line mode.

OK, so it's a possibility. But I think I won't touch it until I can
find a good way to make sure the help can be translated/formatted and
displayed properly.

> > * When changing the language, it would be nice to set the locale
> > too, so that the date and the numbers are formatted properly for
> > the given language. [...]
> 
> Yeah the problem is that some locale are simply not good for
> astronomy. [...]
> For the numbers I don't see a problem, although it seems to me that
> this is not such an important issue, because people are used to read
> english style numbers anyway..
> From my experience, a good translation is much more important that
> those 2 locales.

I only wanted to make sure numbers are formatted consistently -- right
now the widgets are localized (see the spin boxes, for example), whereas
the panel and the object info always use "." as a decimal separator.
But I agree it's a minor issue. 

> > * Should FOV and FPS in the panel be translatable? (If so, is it OK
> > to use strings like "FOV %1" and "%1 FPS" to make translation
> > easier?)
> 
> Here the problem is that we cannot allow much bigger words, and that
> the translated FOV or FPS may not be clear to most of they users. I
> mean less clear that the english version. E.g. in french FOV would be
> CDV (Champ De Vue) and this nobody will understand..

That was one of my concerns. (But "Látószög" is still shorter than
"Champ De Vue" :-)). OK, I'll leave them as they are.

> A better way for this problem would be to replace the words with
> symbols/icons?

Only if we have good (straightforward) icons -- the kind you don't have
to "learn" first.

> > * Would it be OK to change the object info labels to use
> > QString::arg instead of concatenating the strings? (Again, to aid
> > translators. "Distance: %1 light years" is so much better from a
> > translator's point of view.) But I don't want to push this.
> 
> Yes I agree. You can go on with this kind of changes in the code.
> However, there are problems with the HTML tags in between. Would it be
> OK to have for translation: "Distance: <b>%1</b> light years"? Somehow
> it would make sense because if the sentence order changes, the HTML
> tags should move as well.

All right then, I can do it sometime next week. And using HTML tags
should be fine. If someone can't deal with them, he/she should not be
translating software anyway.

Thanks for your answers!

-- 
Andras Mohari