[Danny3]

Hello,

Since we have reached Beta 4 of Kodi 16 and most of the new strings have been uploaded to Transifex, I think it's time to make the developers aware of a problem that we, the translators, have
The problem is that most of the english strings become longer whey they are translated
For my language (Romanian), the strings seem to be 30% longer on average, I don't have any stats for others, but it looks like it's the same


Please see the folowing images:



Location: Select a movie and press "i" key (Movie information -> "Set myrating" string
Affected languages: Romanian, Italian, French, German




Location: Main menu buttons
My language is the most affected
To translate the string correctly and in an understandable manner I need something like

MOVIES = ARTISTIC MOVIES
TV SHOWS = SERIAL MOVIES
This is just an example, we have are reverse order of words
The image above is just the locally edited confluence strings.po file for testing
I actually managed to translate them into single words to fit, I was just wondering if the more correct 2 words translation would fit, it doesn't

Other affected languages: Italian and German (on Play disc)



Location: SYSTEM - > Add-ons -> open left side panel
Affected languages: Romanian, Italian, French, German



On our part the translators, we can only try to use some other shorter words with the same meaning, this is hard and limited, this is what we are already doing it, and we compromise the quality using shorter, not so widely used and understood words

I hope on your part you can do more
Right now Strings in Confluence look best only for english
The ideal solution, I think, would be to put all the buttons in a vertical list with a long enough width, maybe like it was the home menu a long time ago, this would solve the "Movie information" buttons and home screen buttons problem

Since this is not practical, maybe you can do this for now:
1. remove a little bit of the side padding on the buttons in the first image
2. Make the menu longer so that the string fit no matter how long they are, more horizontal scroll
3. add a little bit more width on the add-ons side panel

If you are aware and think that this is not a issue since you have a nice automatic scrolling of text on mouse hover then feel free to close or delete this thread
I just wanted to make sure that you know about this issue that bothers me

Thanks

[ronie]

thanx, great report! :-)

1) sounds reasonable and makes sense. i'll reduce the padding on both sides.

2) i haven't checked the other languages, but i'm afraid we would end up with a menu
that would only fit 3 items on screen and wouldn't look just as nice.

3) it's possible, though it would be quite an intrusive change to make this close to release.
another problem is how much extra width to add. i could add ~50 px. to make the romanian strings fit,
but if it should be wide enough for all languages....

[Danny3]

Hi ronie, thanks for posting

1) I was thinking that because the strings are center aligned a little less padding will make no difference for english while allowing other languages not to be clipped so soon
I assume that last button box couldn't be made longer in length even that it has 3 words in it, to keep all the buttons equal
2) I understand and I can't think of any good solution
The only thing I know is that making a horizontal list of text is bad when you want dynamic length of text and translating the items proves this very well
Same problem can be found on Themoviedb website too:



I think they are trying to make an interface for mobiles with one-size-fits-all with an responsive metro-like layout
I hope they realize that there's a problem with this and it's pretty much impossible to read compared the the vertical list that was before

3) Don't worry, don't bother adding 50 px for romanian

I just hope in the future the designer of confluence will try to fit the strings of a "longer" language like German
I think that if German fits, 90% of other languages will fit
The only other solution I see is to count the characters of translations and see which language requires the most and try to fit that, maybe Transifex can offer some statistics