[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [freeciv-data] Re: Translation of Freeciv motto

[Mathias Hasselmann <Mathias.Hasselmann@xxxxxx>]

Piotr Sulecki wrote:
> 
> Ave!
> 
> > "'Cause civilization(s) should be free!" is *not* the standard motto.  The
> > standard motto is "'Cause civilization should be free!" -- without the
> > "(s)".  So, there is no "English language trick".
> 
> There is one trick which is really there, but not with the
> "Civilisation" word. 

Are you sure about this? Read it again.
But probably we have to ask the guy who introduced the motto.

> It's with "free". In English, "free" means both "costing nothing"
> and "able to do anything", as in "free beer" vs "free speech". "Free
> beer" meaning applies to the product, "free speech" -- to the term.
> And _this_ is certainly hard to translate.

"The Sid Meyer's Civilization should costing nothing." is
surely part of the prone. It's probably the first thought
of the author (who was it - probably we can ask him?).

Then we also have "The sources of Sid Meyer's Civilization
should be free."

And political: "Civilization (as a group of people) should
be free."

I do not know how someone wants to make a *good* translation
of this. Since nearly all users of free software have to be
able to read English. The next point is that current
implementation of motto rendering looks terrible and
implementing a high quality algorithm would be a waste of
time (for this usage).

Well, probably this could be done by rendering the text
into a pixmap for each language. But then Freeciv would
have to be distributed on a CD-ROM soon...

So, who does remove the _("curlies") from the source? ;)

Ciao,
Mathias
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