The translator's corner

[Zogu]

Hi! As discussed several months ago, I have finally started translating Weird Worlds in French. This is a huge task, but it is not impossible. When it comes to video games, applications or web services, we talk about "localization", that is, adapting a program to a locale. In some cases, it involves changes in icons and symbols, shortcuts, menu structures, text orientation and so on. In our case, hopefully, it only involves changes in the text content.

In the last upgrade (1.2), I was pleased to find a "strings.ini" file, which means that the whole game would be (hopefully) customizable, down to the button labels. Amazing! Since the graphic character set (font_16x32.tga) contains most western-european accented letters, it is possible to translate it to many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Swedish, etc. And yeah, probably Finnish too. It seems to cover ISO 8859-1 pretty well.

It would be technically possible to cover languages such as Vietnamese and Turkish, with minor modifications to the graphic font, without making the base (English) text garbled. Nice.

For this "side project", I work without any translation tool (which is unfortunate, since there is a lot of repeats and similar strings in the ini files). So far, I have translated most of the GUI, the mission file, and the race files. I still have a lot of work to do, covering ships, quests and items.

I have met very few problems. I'd say that more than 95% of the game uses resource strings, with a few hard-coded strings. Here are my comments.

A few missing resource strings:
Some vidcast window titles are still using hard-coded strings, for instance the Urluquai vidcast and the mid-mission pop-up.

Month names ("JAN", "FEB", ...) are also hard-coded, but this is a very minor detail.

Translated strings too large for buttons:
In some cases, the buttons don't leave much space for longer words or expressions. This is a real challenge for the translator. How will I translate "FOLD" (???)? How will I translate "RETIRE" (RETRAITE?) or "BOARD" (ABORDER?)? I'll come up with something, but it takes a few tries!

String position dependent on text:
In some rare cases, the displayed string is positioned absolutely, for instance the "RAM" label that appears in combat. It is a challenge to come up with a word that won't be un-centered to the right.

Ship names:
The ships display names are hard to translate because they are also used as "keys" or "variables". Thus, if I change the name of the Terran Corvette, I'll have to propagate this change immediately across all files. Otherwise, I'll have broken references. This problem wouldn't arise if we had a ship "internal" ("TER-COR") name and a display name ("Terran Corvette"). I'll keep that for the end, and I'll use the "replace in filesystem" function in Textpad. Nifty!

Graphic text:
A single graphic file needed to be modified, the CARGO icon. However, "CARGO" could be considered OK in French. I've replaced it with "SOUTE", which is more acceptable. It's nice that this game doesn't rely on graphic text at all. Truly moddable!

As soon as the translation if finished, I'll upload the Mod here. The file selection I'll provide could be used by translators who wish to localize the game in other languages.