Translation guidelines

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We now have a community site for doing translations:


And I noticed something regarding a few of the translations. It seems many of them have decided to leave things like “Chemoplast” and “OxyToxy” as is, but when doing the Finnish translation I decided to make more Finnish words for those as well.

For Chemo-plast I decided to just translate the parts and ended with “Kemoplasti”, which is not really a word but then again chemoplast isn’t a word either, but in this case I did a similar thing in the translation.
For OxyToxy I translated the full words it is made up of: “Oxygen”, “Toxin”, as “Happi” and “Myrkky”. Then I mashed them up as “Happimyrkky” which is only a slightly longer word than OxyToxy. It’s a bit clunky, but I think translations should try to reconstruct these made up words to fit the target language better. As such I think we should disallow translations to include the words “Chemoplast” and “OxyToxy”, if no suitable alternative is thought of the translations should be just left blank for now.

What do you guys think?
I think we should write a wiki page about this, that is linked from Github and from weblate as well as guidance for doing translations.

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I’ve been doing the same thing, except I translated OxyToxy as just ‘toxins’. I’m going to look for alternatives on OxyToxy.

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In German “Chemoplast” or “Chemoplaste” are actually valid words, so I kept it as it is.
“OxyToxy” was a bit more difficult, because the German word for “Oxygen” is “Sauerstoff”.
I can’t use “SauToxid” because Sau means sow. I also cannot use “SauerToxid” because Sauer means sour. I’ve translated “OxyToxy” to “OxyToxid”. In German chemistry Oxygen or Oxy is the correct prefix, so it does sound OK.

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I trusted upon you that all the words existed, so I left them as they are. But many chemistry french words stay the same as in english because this is based on ancient languages translations (Greek and Latin particularly)

Still my brain do froze on some real french translations because even if they are right, they look ugly (Nitrogenase -> Azotease for example)
For the OxyToxy case I left it like that, hesitating with making OxyToxin because there is a french word, that is something else, that pronounce exactly the same as i would pronounce OxyToxin.

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Made the wiki page for the guidelines: