Translating

Zogu · #1 December 15th, 2005, 06:36 PM

Hi!
I've looked at the game resources and files, and it seems that Weird Worlds would be easily translated in other western languages (based on ISO 8851-1).

Maybe I could produce a port to Canadian French, as my first mod... that would allow some of my friends (who aren't fluent in English) to play the game...

Zogu · #2 December 16th, 2005, 12:37 AM

Addendum to my first message.

I can easily translate all the "storyline" resources: item names, planet names, characters, dialogs, events, and so on. Everything that is moddable (of course).

But is it possible to modify the game's built-in labels, dialogs, and button text? The stuff that's part of the user interface in the game...

If not, it would be nice to include a fully "resource-based" version of the game in a further release. It doesn't require much effort -- simply transfer all the displayed labels into a text or ini file. This would make the game totally localizable (translatable), and it would reach a much broader public.

Games translated in certain languages are quite rare -- say, Swedish, Icelandic and Catalan. These languages are based on the standard Western character set.

If somebody from these communities can perform the WW:RTIS translation easily, this would open great markets for the game. Not everybody is fluent in English, but most people have a credit card.

Modding and localizing (translating) are two slightly different activities, but I'm pretty sure WW can be flexible enough to provide both.

Fingers · #3 December 16th, 2005, 03:39 PM

There are some hardcoded strings you can't currently change in a mod. All the text was modifiable in Strange Adventures in Infinite Space so it would've been possible to localize it, but nobody ever did... It's a lot more work than you think, as there's a ton of text in the game in hundreds of separate files.

Zogu · #4 December 16th, 2005, 06:58 PM

I'm a professional translator (English to French), and I work on resource files very often. I translate/localize large applications for telecommunications companies.

I used a word counting tool to evaluate the amount of work in WW (excluding the hardcoded stuff of course -- which isn't that large anyway), and it's OK. It can be done as a nice side project/hobby.

PS: I've worked (marginally) on translations for Lux (a Risk clone by Sillysoft -- I've also modded for that game) and YaBB (a bulletin board software).

Fingers · #5 December 16th, 2005, 09:54 PM

Well, maybe we'll add a strings.ini in the 1.2 or something