Translations with room issues (at least german looks ugly still sometimes)
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux Mint |
Triaged
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
I have attached a screenshot for easier explanation.
- compound words
In some cases a translated string is longer than the original and there's not enough space to display it.
Especially the german language has a favour for - sometimes ridiculously - long words, like in these two cases "Anwendungspake
You could find paraphrasings for those long words, but it would read weird. The language is that way.
I think, there should be hyphenation to solve this.
- to long descriptions
"Fenster: Kacheln und Randumsch..."
Ok, there has to be a limit, and when a translator puts a string that's too long, you have to truncate it and "..." is the way to do it.
But there's not even a tooltip to display the hole string, one would expect that.
But:
there's an awful lot of space around every icon and it's only use seems to be the neat button effect for the brief second when you have clicked an icon but the next page in the system settings hasn't opened yet.
Summary:
Having icons arranged with so much space in between, but translation strings are handled badly looks very unprofessional.
Solutions:
- hypenation
- tool tips
- more room for strings. that it's working with the english language doesn't mean it's working for everyone else
A adressed this, because this has been an issue for a while now. The system settings window was way worse in the german translation way back and has gotten much better, but there's still some problems left.
| Friedemann Becker (friedemann-becker) wrote | #1 |
| Michael Webster (miketwebster) wrote | #2 |
| Changed in linuxmint: | |
| status: | New → Triaged |
| Friedemann Becker (friedemann-becker) wrote | #3 |
| Tobias Bannert (toba) wrote | #4 |
This is not a problem we're unaware of - at least in the settings view - we actually had coded it to look at the length of translated strings (not the english,) and try to maintain a sensible spacing between items, as well as line-wrap longer words (I believe German was the worst offender) so everything fit.
The trouble is the widget we're using to display the icons and their labels just stinks at figuring out how much spacing to use for these items. Trying to manually control layout (based on the current locale) didn't fare much better. And we would still end up with ellipsized entries because some words were simply too long.
Another problem was many of the translations for Eastern languages (Japanese, etc..) didn't split correctly, and would mess up the calculations.
In the end, you'd end up with German locale providing only 4 columns for example, which would look really bad (and we got bug reports for it) and English which would look nice at 6 columns.
Not long prior to 2.2 release we sort of scrapped the whole algorithm and just ended up hardcoding/
So anyhow, more info than you probably were interested in, but it's definitely something we're not happy with and want to fix once and for all, it just had to be held back for 2.2.