Translation addons

WARNING: After a .po update and install, run GCompris with --reread-menu option in order to see your changes. (GCompris caches strings in a database).

To update only you po file, run: intltool-update lang (lang is fr for French).

GCompris is a little bit special in terms of translation needs. The best is done to bring back everything to .po files but it is not exhaustive.

To complete the translation, you must also provide:

Missing letter

Note that in the po file when you encounter string like this:

1. ../boards/missing_letter/board1.xml.in.h:2

msgid "apple/appl_/e/h/a"

The number in board1.xml.in means this word will be provided at level 1 of this very activity in gcompris.

Here is the format description:

The word to find	The _ is the missing letter	3 proposals, choose them to confuse the children
apple	appl_	/e/h/a

Word list

General word list

A single word list file for your locale named: src/readingh-activity/resources/wordsgame/default-XX.xml Where XX is your target locale. You can pick the english file from our git repository to get an up to date example.

Note that these words must be choosen to be simple in your language, don't necessary translate the English. Also, if you only keep one list, it is important to make sure that these words can be written with your keyboard in one key (no alt gr stuff or compose key). We will explain more about fine-tuning word lists for different activities below.

In order to be useful, this list must contain about 1000 words. If you can, pick the words from a school children book or wiktionary.

The files are XML formatted. There should be at least 5 level sections which contain:

Here is the format description:

Level	Word Length
1	< 4 and very easy to type
2	= 4 or < 4 not so easy
3	= 5
4	= 6
5	> 6

There are currently three activities that use this word list:

/computer/keyboard/wordsgame
/reading/readingh and /reading/readingv
/reading/hangman

You can provide separate word lists for them if your language needs this.

Word list level design

Here are some level design suggestions for you. Of course, you can do as best fits your language!

Wordsgame (Typing words)

This is a typing game. Unless your language has characters that are difficult to type, just follow the rules layed out above for English. If your language has letters that require more keystrokes than simple letters, it is best to keep these letters out of the lower levels. Create a level higher up that will introduce them with some shorter words, then start to mix. Keep the words with complicated letters in them shorter than the other words, and keep in mind that they also require more thinking, not just more keystrokes! The number of levels is flexible, so if there are complicated letters to learn, you can create as many levels as you need to introduce them.

Example:

Level	Word Length
1	2 - 3 simple letters
2	= 4 simple letters
3	= 5 simple letters
4	= 6 simple letters
5	2 - 3 accented letters
6	= 4 - 5 accented letters
7	= 7 - 14 simple letters, 5 - 10 accented letters

Reading

In this game, words on the same level should have the same length. Just follow the rules layed out above for the general word list, except that you can have letters in there that are complicated to type. This is a reading activity, so typing doesn't matter here.

Hangman

For Hangman, take your reading list and reverse the letters. Short words are harder than long words in hangman! Remove all words that are longer than 10 letters, because they won't fit the screen.

Note that this game supports complex letters, e.g. <sh> makes a single sound in English, so you could design the game to have a button with "sh" on it if you want. The letter buttons are defined in the PO-File. The PO-File also provides an option for keyboard shortcuts for complex letters. For example, if I have both "s" and "sh", if I type <s>, "s" gets selected. However, I could define "sh=S" in the PO-File, so when I type uppercase <S>, "sh" gets selected.

Simple Letters (gletters)

This game uses wordlist XML-files for level design. This supports multigraphs as well; see the above section about Word Lists for more details on the format. Put each letter/multigraph into a new line, like this:

<level value="1">
a
à
b
c
ch
d
dh
...
</level>

You should define two letter lists for your language:

default

Levels containing both uppercase and lowercase letters (if your language has them)

upper

Levels containing letters that will be displayed in uppercase only. In the XML file, you can write them in lowercase if you want for easier typing; GCompris will convert them as appropriate.

If your language doesn't distinguish between lower- and uppercase letters, maybe you can use the two files to create a "baby" and an "advanced" mode instead. If upper doesn't exist, GCompris reverts to default.

We have converted the translations from the old format in the PO files to XML file where available; you should go through them though to make sure the level design makes sense. For example, only introduce letters that require more than one keystroke in the upper levels. Here are some design examples - they have not been play tested yet, so please do feel free to improve on this!

Level design example: no complex characters

Level	default-en	upper-en
1	lowercase	vowels
2	lowercase + numbers	vowels + numbers
3	uppercase	consonants
4	uppercase + numbers	consonants + numbers
5	lowercase + uppercase	vowels + consonants
6	everything: lowercase + uppercase + numbers	everything: vowels + consonants + numbers

Level design example: default-gd; language with accented vowels and consonantal digraphs

Level	Letter type
1	lowercase-simple
2	lowercase-simple + numbers
3	uppercase-simple
4	uppercase-simple + numbers
5	lowercase-simple + uppercase-simple
6	lowercase-complex
7	uppercase-complex
8	lowercase-complex + uppercase-complex
9	everything: lowercase-simple + lowercase-complex + uppercase-simple + uppercase-complex + numbers

Click on letter

Automatic level generation from alphabet

First, translate the following string in the PO-file to specify all the letters:

a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i/j/k/l/m/n/o/p/q/r/s/t/u/v/w/x/y/z

You can use multigraphs. For example, /sch/ counts as a single letter. The important thing is that you separate your letters with / and that you have no white spaces in between. Once you have done this, on a first installation, GCompris will create random levels from the alphabet the first time the game is played in your language.

Manually designing your levels

We recommend you do some level design yourself, so letters are introduced in an order that makes sense. For this, you need to create a 'desktop' file. In the source code, these are found in src/click_on_letter/resources/click_on_letter/default-<locale>.desktop for the lowercase game and in src/click_on_letter/resources/click_on_letter/upper-<locale>.desktop for the uppercase game. This file describes the different levels of this activity and depends on how letters are taught to children in your language. The file looks like this

# Section matches the level, you can put any number of level
# but they must be in sequence starting at 1

# Question is a list of letters that will be asked to search for
# Answer is a list of possible answers the children will have to choose from
# WARNING: It is up to you to put at least all the Question letters in the Answer.
#          You can also add some confusing letters in the Answer section
# WARNING: Answer must have at max 18 characters
[1]
Questions=a e i o u y
Answers=a e i o u y
...

Letters can also be made up of more than one letter, turning them into multigraphs:

[11]
Questions=i u ì ù mh dh gh l t f n
Answers=i u ì ù mh dh gh l t f n

For designing your levels, rather than coding the desktop files by hand, you can also start the game and use the Configuration option. Please note that there is a little bug: after editing a cell in the table, you have to click somewhere else on the list to leave the cell's edit mode before hitting any buttons, or your edit will get lost. Once you're finished designing the activity for your language, you will find the desktop file in <userdir>/My GCompris/click_on_letter. You can design separate levels for the lowercase and the uppercase game if you want.

Voices

A complete voice translation in boards/voices/yy The voices are in a separate git branch. If you got the source from the git, you can get the voices simply by running 'make update-voices'. It is best to choose somebody that speaks and articulate well your language. What is great with GCompris is that you can use it to practice a foreign language. Read the file boards/voices/HOWTO_ENCODE and this page to get more detailed instructions

To check that you completed the translation of all voices and that there are no missing files. You can use the tool check_missing_voices.pl located in the tools directory.