Is the Instrument names language dialog a placeholder, or is it working by now?
Perhaps I needed to do it right at the start, or I did something wrong. If it isn’t working, would you guys like/be available to crowdsource the translations?
Changing the options on the Language page of Engraving Options only affects instruments you subsequently add to the project, and does not change the names of existing instruments in the project.
If you come across specific problems with the translation of the instrument names, please do let me know what they are and I will pass them on to our translation team.
Oh, okay, that clears it. This is a very, very minor gripe, but perhaps it should apply to instruments already created, as any other engraving option does? In terms of workflow, I can’t imagine anyone popping by engraving options beforehand, but perhaps you have other feedback?
Something also quite minor that I’ll just throw in here: will “opera-style”, character-name instrument labels be made available at some point in the future?
I agree it would be good if that option could apply retrospectively. Maybe one day!
Can you tell me a little more about what you mean by “opera-style” instrument labels? Thanks.
I meant this:
Dear Daniel,
I would be interested in that feature too… It would be the ability to have on the same staff two or more different singers that do not sing at the same time, to use less staves. They sing their part on the singer staff when they are the only singing, and when the vocal lines happen at the same time, they get their own staff back. Quite complicated to code, I guess, but this would be awesome. When Dorico can handle automatic reduction, I think this will be the time for that kind of feature 
Well, I would assume that Dorico will be able to handle that just fine by the condensing mechanism as Daniel imagines it. Hopefully it won’t prove too hard in practice.
This is easy enough to fake, but I raised the issue as food for thought. When the character appears in full above the staff, it shouldn’t get labelled in the systemic barline — that is the tricky part.
Doesn’t Dorico already get close to this if you give a solo “player” (i.e. a generic singer) several “instruments” (i.e. different characters) and then switch off the messages like “change to Hamlet”?
If there are notes in more than one of the “instruments” you do get multiple staves in the score - but I don’t know whether that is by accident or design, in the current version of the code.
Definitely! But sometimes in opera and music theatre, you also need combination of characters, such as ‘Hamlet + Ofeila’, ‘Men’, etc. Creating new instruments for all of them feels a bit unnecessary.
It is of course easy to achieve this with the text tool, but somewhere down the line, the Dorico might come up with something brilliant 
We definitely hope to be able to address this kind of thing with the planned work on condensing, though it certainly has its challenges (e.g. what if the different characters singing together use different clefs, or have completely different lyrics, etc. – the music would have to be reasonably similar in order for Dorico to decide to try and put it all on the same staff).
Great call: I didn’t have this in mind. It certainly should work. Cheers!
Getting back to this: while I can’t vouch comprehensively for the accuracy in the translations (as I haven’t gone over them systematically), one thing I can say is that I can’t get the transposition to translate. I’m getting “xyz in Bb” (for example) in Portuguese. Am I doing something wrong?
Non, you are absolutely right. In french it is the same problem, the localization is not completed. I understand this takes time and we will have the right translations in due time