I have completed a translation file for Winboard in the italian language. The file can be found here.
I hope this could be useful to someone: of course it is a spare time work and I assume it will contain quite a bunch of mistakes, but I will volunteer in mantaining it and I will happily apply any correction that should be pointed out here, in this forum, or in the CCC forum.
Some notes: I have tested what I could of the translations (at least all the menu and most of the dialog windows), but some I was not able to test, e.g. the ICS stuff. Also the error messages are difficult to trigger, and in the language file it is not always clear from the english sentence which is the contest in which the message could be raised. Also computer chess is not that much spraded in Italy and there are specific words for which I could not find an obvious translation (think of "chess engine" for instance); same applies for chess variants such as xiangqi (I could find very few references to xiangqi in italian, and I couldn't figure out a general consensus regarding the name of some pieces). That's why I myself will keep on using WB (and many other different applications, for that matter) with the english locale: after all I spend most of the time on english speaking fora or help files, and I prefer to stay familiar with the terms that are actually used there. On the other hand, I understand that an occasional user could very well benefit from a translation in his native language.
That said, I could provide a translation for the WB help file, too, but as I realize this would be a huge amount of work I won't do it unless there is a real demand for it.
In the end, let me point out some bugs/remarks, which I stumbled on while translating the language file.
I used as starting base the language.txt file provided in the latest snapshot of **data, found on the nubati GIT repository :
- at row 48:
"New &Game\tCtrl-N" === ""
should be:
"&New Game\tCtrl-N" === "" - at about row 169, some strings for Shogi pieces are missing: "Lance", "Silver", "Gold".
- at row 236:
"Save Style" === ""
should be:
"Save As: " === "" - at row 615:
"You can only start a match from the initial position"
should be:
"You can only start a match from the initial position." (note the final dot!) - at row 895, you have left in the spanish translation...
- moreover, it would be nice if you could enlarge some other label here and there, in detail:
- the label for "Inde&x number:", found at row 346 (in INDEX (IN FILE-BROWSE DIALOG))
- the labels for: "Engine #1 Score is Absolute", "Engine #2 Score is Absolute", found at row 505 (in ADJUDICATIONS DIALOG)
- the label for: "Use Book:", found at row 515 (in COMMON ENGINE DIALOG)
- the labels for : "ranks", "Holdings with room for:", found at row 523 (in NEW-VARIANT DIALOG)
- the label for "Inde&x number:", found at row 346 (in INDEX (IN FILE-BROWSE DIALOG))
That's all
Thank you for the great effort you put in mantaining Winboard and this forum, my chess life would not be the same without it!
Later,
- Giorgio
