[Freeciv-Dev] Re: New feature proposal: translated names for cities.

[Miguel Farah <miguel.farah@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/6/05, Christian Knoke <chrisk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 11:35:54PM -0400, Miguel Farah wrote:
>
> > I toyed with the idea of each player seeing each city with the
> > translated name all the time (i.e.: as the Spanish player, I'd always
> > see the city "Londres" instead of "London", regardless of who owns it),
> > but I think this might be overkill. Auto-renaming a conquest should be
> > sufficient.
>
> When people chat about the game and the cities they have, different names
> may be a problem. Especially with chinese or russian names. :) Maybe the
> english name should also be present?

I was thinking strictly about renaming a conquered city to "my" version
of the name. I think that if "London" is mine now, it shall be referred
to as "Londres" onwards. I own the city, after all. :-)

I did mention in my first post that I toyed with the idea of each player
seeing each city with the translated name all the time. Maybe it's not
overkill after all. It could be displayed as "Londres (aka London") to
someone playing as the english nation... OR as an english-speaking
nation (american, australian, canadian, english and filipino, and
possibly also scottish, irish and welsh). This, however, opens another
can of worms that I'll talk about below.


> Besides this, I like your idea much.
>
> For big and well-known cities, this will look cute. But what with the
> smaller ones? When you translate them, you may end up with the name of an
> existing city of another nation. Nobody will recognise such names when
> translated, well it might be difficult.

Yes, of course. Then again, pretty much all the cities with alternate
names fall into three categories:

1) the biggest cities of a given nation (examples: London->Londres,
   München->Munich, Moskva->{Moscú,Moscow}, etc.).

2) cities culturally close to another nation or that were in the past
   part of it (examples: many of the cities in today's southern France:
   Bayonne->Bayona and Marsaille->Marsella for the former case,
   Perpignan->Perpiñán for the latter).

3) cities whose name has been composed according to some rule:
   - adding the suffix "-burg" or one alike, like
     Hamburg->Hamburgo or Cherbourg->Cherburgo.
   - cities named after saints (Saint Nazaire->San Nazario,
     Sao Paulo->San Pablo and many many other examples).
   - "new" cities: New York->Nueva York.

As I said before, my intention is to rename only conquered cities that
DO have an alternate name by which it's known to the members of the
conquering nation (so a spanish conqueror would rename Bayonne to
"Bayona", but an english conqueror would never rename Buenos Aires as
"Good Airs" or Villaviciosa as "Vicious Village").


I looked up SOME rulesets, looking for cities with alternate spanish
names, and this is what I've gotten:

french ruleset
--------------
Paris       París
Marseille   Marsella
Bordeaux    Burdeos
Toulouse    Tolosa
Avignon     Aviñón
Cherbourg   Cherburgo
St. Etienne San Esteban
Perpignan   Perpiñán
St. Nazaire San Nazario

danish ruleset
--------------
København   Copenhagen

german ruleset
--------------
Berlin      Berlín
Hamburg     Hamburgo
München     Munich
Nürnberg    Nuremberg
*burg       *burgo

italian ruleset
---------------
Milano      Milán
Napoli      Nápoles
Venezia     Venecia
Genova      Génova
Modena      Módena
Firenze     Florencia
Bologna     Boloña

russian ruleset
---------------
Moskva          Moscú
St. Petersburg  San Petersburgo
Yekaterinburg   Yekaterinburgo
Volgograd       Volgogrado

swedish ruleset
---------------
Stockholm   Estocolmo
Göteborg    Goteburgo
Helsingborg Helsingburgo

As you can see, only a few cities on each nation DO have alternate
names. The ones with the most are nations that are pretty close (France
and Italy). The ones with a very different language have a
transliterated name (København->Copenhagen).


On the other hand, the catalan ruleset poses a different situation
(Catalunya being a part of Spain, many cities are present in both
rulesets):

1) cities that appear in spanish ruleset, with the same spelling:
        Barcelona
        Tarragona
        Valencia
        Tolosa
        Tortosa
        Cardona
        Mataró
        Badalona
        Sabadell

2) cities that appear in spanish ruleset, with an alternate spelling or
   name:
        Lleida                  Lérida
        Girona                  Gerona
        La Seu d'Urgell         Seo de Urgel
        Terrassa                Tarrasa
        Alacant                 Alicante
        Elx                     Elche
        Castelló de la Plana    Castellón de la Plana
        Eivissa                 Ibiza
        Figueres                Figueras

3) cities that do not appear in spanish ruleset, yet have a spanish
   spelling or name:
        Perpinyà                Perpiñán
        Santes Creus            Santas Cruces
        Montblanc               Monte Blanco
        Ciutadella              Ciudadela
        Penyiscola              Peñíscola
        Sant Feliu de Guíxols   San Felipe de Guixols
        L'Hospitalet            Hospitalet
        Banyoles                Bañolas

Of course, there are cities NOT in the spanish ruleset that do not have
an alternate name in spanish (Igualada, Prada, Begur, etc.); there are
more cities on each of these sections, but I think that's enough.



> Maybe the translation should all be deliberate, so that the translators
> decide which names to translate at all, maybe just the big ones? It will be
> hard to find translations for the others anyway. I don't know a single US
> city name with a proper german translation.

If there isn't a city where the {germans|americans|etc.} use an
alternate name to refer to it, then by all means let's leave the
original name. Some nations don't bother with it; others, on the other
hand have done so for centuries (no one in Spain would instantly
understand if you said "I'm going to Marsaille." - you'd have to say
"I'm going to Marsella.").



> > [2] This might happen frequently when two nations share many cities. For
> >     example, the spanish ruleset includes the cities of Gerona and
> >     Lérida, which are the same as the cities of Girona and Lleida in the
> >     catalan ruleset. If both nations are in a game, and the spanish
> >     (which already have founded Lérida) conquer the enemy city of
> >     Lleida, no renaming could take place.
>
> So the citynames option should be aware of the translations? For example, if
> citynames=2 Girona is forbidden to use for city founding when Gerona is in
> use?

I didn't think of that, but it seems appropiate.

In light of this, maybe it would be better to have a new ruleset
file ("alternate_city_names.ruleset"), where equivalent city names can
be listed. Something like this (rough approach):

----8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<----
{ "Lleida", "catalan"
  "Lérida", "spanish"
}

{ "Donostia",     "basque"
  "San Sebastián, "spanish"
}

{ "Moskva", "russian"
  "Moscow", "english"
  "Moscou", "french"
  "Moscú",  "spanish"
}

{ "Perpinyán", "catalan"
  "Perpignan", "french"
  "Perpiñán",  "spanish"
}

{ "Firenze",   "italian"
  "Florence",  "english"
  "Florencia", "spanish"
}
----8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<----




Now, let's go for the other can of worms. Above, I said:

I did mention in my first post that I toyed with the idea of each player
seeing each city with the translated name all the time. [...] It could
be displayed as "Londres (aka London") to someone playing as the english
nation... OR as an english-speaking nation (american, australian,
canadian, english and filipino, and possibly also scottish, irish and
welsh). [...]

For this to work, we need to know what language does a nation speak -
the ruleset for each nation should have a new line stating the languages
it "knows":

spanish  ruleset: languages="spanish, catalan, basque, galician"
catalan  ruleset: languages="catalan, spanish"
english  ruleset: languages="english"
american ruleset: languages="english"
canadian ruleset: languages="english, french"
bavarian ruleset: languages="german"
(etc.)

The name/country pairs would have to be changed to name/language
(granted, most of the entries won't change as usually the language has
the same name as the nation).



--
Miguel Farah
miguel@xxxxxxxx