GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 653815
Length demands unreasonable
Last modified: 2011-09-10 19:11:18 UTC
The demands on not exceeding the English text size in the translation is unusual, and sounds unreasonable: #. Translators: Please, do not make the translated string longer than the original English one. It will not fit in screen. #: ../src/Games/Logic/PuzzleGridDots.cs:220 msgid "" "From the top-left figure, the top-left circle moves down, the bottom-left " "circle moves up, the bottom-right moves diagonally up-left and the top-right " "moves diagonally down-left." I'm obviously not familiar with the code, so I'm sure there is some reason, but if we want to make this a multilingual game, then please reconsider this seriously. Here is some interesting article about the issue: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/article-text-size According to those estimates, you should expect an average of 30-40% expansion. In other words even allowing 30-40% expansion is unlikely to be enough for everybody. We'll commit a translation shorter than the English, but whoever plays it, will just think the translators are stupid and should not be allowed to translate the game, since we had to use really unnatural language.
You are completely right. I fixed the UI to allow to resize as needed and removed the comment in the string. Thanks, Jordi,
Thanks! I updated the translation for Afrikaans (af). It might be worthwhile to announce this on the mailing list, since the strings wouldn't have gone fuzzy, and might not have drawn attention.