Ready for translations

Tchey · 2020-08-08 15:58:10

Hi,

Not sure how you like to handle it later, but IMO the files should be organized to have plain readable texts, so anyone with time and skills could translate the game into any languages, opening it to a larger audience.

Darin · 2020-08-08 16:13:13

I agree entirely and was thinking of something like this myself -- all text shown in the game being loaded from config files.
All the units, techs, buildings, and resources are already setup like this (although some of the AI code assumes some specific names, but that's easily fixable).

One minor issue is that I don't know how well non-ASCII characters are going to do in the terminal (both across terminals and platforms).

For French, at least, how necessary are accented characters? Is it equally understandable without them? (And if so, do you think it would butcher the translation too much if it were limited to ASCII?)

Tchey · 2020-08-08 16:31:45

In french, éèàô and other are importante, they can change the meaning of a word.
In spanish they have tilde ñ and other i think
In turkish they have a kind of i without the dot, so mode like "|"
etc

Extended ASCII does that, to an extend, but i know nothing about AF compatibility.

Darin · 2020-08-08 16:42:39

I see, thanks. I'll plan to look into what options I have and for what terminals and platforms they'd be options. It's definitely possible, just a question of how.

Darin · 2020-08-08 23:46:22

Accents seem to work pretty much immediately in AF in the terminals I've tested on Linux (Konsole, and the linux text mode without any display server).

Although I can't seem to get it to work on Windows or OS X. I'll revisit this later. Maybe something about the version of PDcurses and ncurses I'm using on those platforms.

Darin · 2020-08-10 00:48:53

While I haven't gotten accents supported on platforms other than Linux, I started to work a little on multi-language support, figuring I'll solve the display issues on other platforms later.

I figure now is the best time than ever to start adding multi-language functionality. It's only going to get more time-consuming and difficult the longer I wait.

Although I'm making no promises this'll be complete for before the next release of the game -- as you can see my development "style" is that I switch around a lot on what I spend time on. But eventually I get things finished

Tchey · 2020-08-10 05:09:55

Nice, thanks for your consideration.

I think the sooner the better, to avoid making some choices locking down translation possibilities.

Not the translation itself, as the game is in a very early stage and will charge a lot i suppose, but the tools to do it must be set early, from what i understand of the process.

Darin · 2020-08-11 20:30:18

The game now has basic functionality to change the language preferences and text via a config file. However, there are still many, many places that it still uses the original hard-coded text (in English). I'll plan to gradually move them over to the new system when I see them.

There are still some parts I haven't figured out how I want to deal with yet. Text like this (which also is colorized in the game):
"The {attackee battalion name} {unit type} Battalion has been attacked by the {attacker battalion name} {unit type} Battalion."

If I could assume the {} tags occur in the same order across all languages, it would be much easier. But I think I can't since some languages order stuff like this differently. Probably the only solution is to write a somewhat generic parser for this. Which is mildly time-consuming but do-able.

Here's how the title page looks with some potentially botched translations from Google translate:
Title screen languages

Tchey · 2020-08-12 06:57:53

Nice !

You’re right about sentences constructions, it will create some oddities, but could be better than english for non-english speakers.
It’s too soon to translate anyway, i thing, because of how the game is going to change in the next months (years ?).

So you have time to de-hard coding the text, hehe.

Arcane Fortune Forums

#1 2020-08-08 15:58:10

Ready for translations

#2 2020-08-08 16:13:13

Re: Ready for translations

#3 2020-08-08 16:31:45

Re: Ready for translations

#4 2020-08-08 16:42:39

Re: Ready for translations

#5 2020-08-08 23:46:22

Re: Ready for translations

#6 2020-08-10 00:48:53

Re: Ready for translations

#7 2020-08-10 05:09:55

Re: Ready for translations

#8 2020-08-11 20:30:18

Re: Ready for translations

#9 2020-08-12 06:57:53

Re: Ready for translations

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