Translation of GPL preamble in GUI and CLI

[hoffie]

Describe the bug

Status quo:

• The GPL preamble in About Jamulus is in English (untranslated). The newly added GPL preamble in --version output is translated. That's inconsistent.
• The way of implementing the translation is non-optimal for translators as pointed out by @BLumia in Update zh_CN app translation for 3.8.2 #2313 (comment)

To Reproduce

• Compare About Jamulus with --version
• or: Perform translations

Expected behavior

We should:

• Decide if this text should be translated at all. For context: cat --version translates it.
• If we do translate, the GUI version should be translated as well (it would be more natural for the command line version not to be translated as other command line outputs aren't translated either).
• If we wanted to show a translated version on CLI, we would have to load translations, which are currently loaded for GUI runs only.
• @BLumia suggested using a single tr ( ) call with included new lines (\n). This sounds good to me. There's also the possibility to pass comments to translators such as "Please align to X characters" (the status quo value for X is rather wide...?). The way to pass such a comment to translators seems to be to use a special //: Comment which is transferred to .ts files by lupdate.

Version of Jamulus

3.8.2_beta1

Additional context

I'm not keen on decoding this, I'm fine either way, but we should be consistent and make life easier for translators.

A lawyer is required to translate agreements. Only one agreement should be official... the original in the official language. I have only seen the GPL in English, thus, Jamulus must have disclaimers for unofficial translated versions.

[henkdegroot]

The single tr() does not really work well in this scenario, as there is more text involved in the command line output for formatting (which is not part of the translated text). Perhaps I should not have included the option to translate that part in the version output, but in my defense I went for a similar approach as "cat".

[hoffie]

The single tr() does not really work well in this scenario, as there is more text involved in the command line output for formatting (which is not part of the translated text).

Couldn't it be part of it though? I was about to submit a PR with exactly this, but stopped when I saw that the GUI part is not translated.

Perhaps I should not have included the option to translate that part in the version output, but in my defense I went for a similar approach as "cat".

No worries :)

[henkdegroot]

Couldn't it be part of it though?

Sure the *** which is at the beginning of each line could be part of the text as well.

Found some information related to the translation of the GPL text: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-translations.html

Interesting fact, the console won't print my local Dutch text. So it prints in English. Tested this on Windows, not sure if all OS's do the same.

[hoffie]

@DavidSavinkoff

Only one agreement should be official

@henkdegroot

Found some information related to the translation of the GPL text: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-translations.html

This issue is "only" about the license declaration though. It's not about the full license text, i.e. the actual agreement. Not saying that the declaration is not important or can't be translated errornously, but it's a big difference in my opinion.

Interesting fact, the console won't print my local Dutch text. So it prints in English. Tested this on Windows, not sure if all OS's do the same.

Heh, interesting, same here. Looks like translations are not loaded for CLI at all:

jamulus/src/main.cpp

Line 813 in 0485745

if ( bUseGUI && bUseTranslation )

[pljones]

Headless doesn't load translations -- they're presumed only used in the GUI.

[BLumia]

The GPL preamble in About Jamulus is in English (untranslated). The newly added GPL preamble in --version output is translated. That's inconsistent.

The GPL content cannot be translated since only the English version is valid (ref).

A lawyer is required to translate agreements.

This issue is about the license declaration than the actual license text, and we're not going to translate the original license text, so I guess it's okay.

... agreements

And since we are on this topic, saying it's an "agreement" doesn't very suitable for GPL since the user doesn't need to "agree" to GPL to use the software, see here, but it's a different issue I guess :P

The single tr() does not really work well in this scenario, as there is more text involved in the command line output for formatting (which is not part of the translated text).

Multiple tr() is still okay, but just don't break one single sentence into two tr()s. But anyway, one thing I don't understand is, why do we need the *** in each line of the text in 8fb8ce7 in the first place?

[henkdegroot]

So should we just remove the translation option from the version text?

[hoffie]

Sounds like this would be the easiest path forward, yeah. The efforts are probably spent better elsewhere.
Let's wait for some other opinions as well, though.

[ann0see]

Yes. I'd remove it.