GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726454
Avoid problematic/akward words in programs
Last modified: 2014-06-21 22:56:48 UTC
Hallo Chess-devs While doing the latest translation update for gnome 3.12 we encountered the following string: #. Window title when the chess engine dies unexpectedly #: ../src/gnome-chess.vala:1145 msgid "The computer player died unexpectedly." Is that really the kind of formulation we want to go with. I mean, the Linux community in general (and translators in particular) have now spent quite some time regretting terminology like "killing a child (process)" etc. because they feel odd to new-comers. So, while those are difficult to change, I would suggest to not add any new ones. How about simply, "The computer player has stopped working" or "... no longer works" "... no longer responds" or something to that effect? Regards Kenneth
The same comment applies to this string: #. Window subtitle when the game ends due to a player dying. #. * This is a PGN standard. GNOME Chess will never kill the user. #: ../src/gnome-chess.vala:1217 -#, fuzzy -#| msgid "One of the players has died" msgid "One of the players has died."
Ahh I see now the note about the standard. If that is the case, then maybe this is irrelevant.
(In reply to comment #0) > Is that really the kind of formulation we want to go with. I mean, the Linux > community in general (and translators in particular) have now spent quite some > time regretting terminology like "killing a child (process)" etc. because they > feel odd to new-comers. [citation needed]
(In reply to comment #0) > How about simply, "The computer player has stopped working" or "... no > longer works" "... no longer responds" or something to that effect? I agree something along these lines would be more familiar to most users. "No longer responds" seems more suited for Bug #726455. We already have a "the computer player is very confused" for when it goes nuts, and it wouldn't be clear why that is different from "stopped working." I guess we could replace them all with one generic "stopped working" message, but maybe we can come up with something better. (In reply to comment #1) > The same comment applies to this string: > > #. Window subtitle when the game ends due to a player dying. > #. * This is a PGN standard. GNOME Chess will never kill the user. > #: ../src/gnome-chess.vala:1217 > -#, fuzzy > -#| msgid "One of the players has died" > msgid "One of the players has died. Even this could be rephrased. I don't think it can currently ever be displayed, since loading completed games has been broken for as long as I remember, but you should be able to load a completed game, and if it's specially-prepared to include the death result then it could be displayed to the user. It would be better to display the message in past tense rather than present tense. And there's no reason for it to not distinguish between which player died, either, so it should say either "White died" or "Black died." Or we could be more detailed: "The game ended because the white player died."
@Christian Point taken, I don't have a reference on that, but I actually thought (rumblings and so on) that it was sort of the general opinion. Anyway, consider it retracted. @Michael I think that at least for the first one it should be fine, but you might wanna be careful with the second one, if that exact formulation is actually a PGN-standard.
The actual message we display is not standard: just the termination condition (death) is.
The following fixes have been pushed: 7547f0a Rephrase the player death message 0ae439e Reword the error message for engine errors
Created attachment 278918 [details] [review] Rephrase the player death message For whatever reason, PGN has a notion of player death, to be used if the moons align and a player is unable to complete a game because he died. Probably no gnome-chess user will ever see this message ever -- he would have to load a specially-prepared PGN -- but let's make it less confusing anyway.
Created attachment 278919 [details] [review] Reword the error message for engine errors It's been reported that the existing error messages could be confusing to users. In particular, the notion of a computer program dying (error message when the engine process is killed) could be confusing. Reword to avoid this.