Internationalization - phase 2

[Tkael]

Jotting down some of the items that we've discussed for future internationalization improvements

• Make scripts modular and translatable (as .resx files?)
• Add a button allowing users of localized scripts to compare to the invariant version? (proposed by Hoksilato in [IDEA] add english/original script button on edit script window #1028) (Or just generally make it easier to translate new / changed scripts)

[richardbuckle]

RESX files are complile-time, thus unsuitable for user-editing.
I have a better storage format in mind that may help here, one that mimics the RESX fallback model but allows for user override.

[richardbuckle]

Re Cottle I want:

• diff-friendly on disk -- no more Cottle encoded in JSON <= this is key
• Therefore each script resides in its own ".cottle" file, not JSON-encoded in an umbrella file because that sucks to edit and diff.
• Therefore we add a new key "script_path" that is a relative path to a *.cottle file and overrides any existing "script" key.
• This enables painless migration from the "script" key. to the "script_path" key.

[Tkael]

So if a ".cottle" isn't found, it would revert to the default? Would the default also be a ".cottle", would it be more like a ".resx", or would we keep the defaults in the current ".json" format?

[richardbuckle]

All these are open for discussion.

[richardbuckle]

I am envisaging a per-script fallback chain exactly as for RESX, by script name, but allowing for user modification at run time. So the lookup chain might be:

• from tbe user-selected script of that name
• from the default script of that name for the user's localisation
• from the base lang script of that name

[Tkael]

As discussed on Discord, we're considering a structure like this for a personality called foo:
foo/index.json -- the index file, resides in`%appdata%\EDDI\personalities
foo/de/ the German localisations
foo//.cottle : the scripts

[richardbuckle]

I would have a single index file foo/index.json.
All scripts including en would be under foo/{language-code}/{script-name}.cottle.

foo/index.json uses simply script-name and the resolver tries foo/{language-code}/{script-name}.cottle for the current language code, falling back to en.

Thoughts welcomed.

[parduz]

The main disadvantage about having a single file per script is that a lot of them shares some code (as example: pluralization) which is'nt trivial to change for localization. Having ALL the scripts in the same file will help in finding/replace the same code with the localized one.

Why not using some ... special comment (like {_ §021§ _} ) at the beginning of each script as an index (similar to the way certain auto-document programs reads "///" comments in C files)?

About comparing the localized scripts with the "invariant" one, problem is the compare engine have to be VERY smart:
right now adding a single line of comment makes it marking ALL the script as different; i can't think how it could check the same logic with different strings passed at the functions.
A very Useful thing for this would be making each script with a strict separation between a logic section (where it do all the needed checks and sets) and the "spoken" section, where localization will make almost everything different.

[richardbuckle]

Good points, noted. I'm going to say a hard no to the "special comment" idea though. Down that path lies madness.

[richardbuckle]

Many languages need to factor out their pluralisation rules, so I am thinking more along the lines of a global "Grammar" script to house such functions.