Translators Wanted
#1
If you want to help translate the game into your language and have some time & patience to deal with the programming aspects of it .. and they're not for the faint of heart .. then we would be happy for your input.
I've said this before, but since there's the hope of a new release coming up, I thought I'd push it again.
Look at the basic file used, this should stop anybody "faint of heart" right off the bat - but please, if you're not totally discouraged right away, I'm willing to help with the first steps!

Basically, what's going on is that some (not nearly all) messages inside the engine have been tagged for translation-capability - then we have a "master"-file with the english version and a "translation"-file with the proper sources for showing that message in another language.
Since there's a number of issues involved with sentence structure etc. there are also a number of aspects that go beyond simply translating the message to make the file work .. but if you can translate the message and talk to a coder to answer questions about word-order and the proper placement of colour-codes etc. you'll be fine .. you don't need to fully understand the file I linked above .. as I said - some willingness to interact with a programmer is required.

At the moment the only language provided is german; some input from Apollo has been tried to be incorporated .. but most of it is still my "quick-n-dirty" translation .. so even the german-language one can still do with some work!

CubeScript is not nearly half tagged, just a bit of the main-menu; once we see this feature actually used we'll be sure to push forward on the scale of translateable messages!!
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#2
What would have to be altered in that file? The words inside the quotation marks ("")? I'd be pleased to succor in the Spanish translation but I just want to have an idea of what I would need to edit, thanks flow.
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#3
Comparing these two hopefully helps:
original file
german translation of the original

Basic example:
msgid "%c2could %c3not resolve%c2 server %c5%s%c2"
msgstr "%1$c2Konnte den Server %4$c5%5$s%6$c2 %2$c3nicht%3$c2 aufloesen"

So, yes, basically you just go ahead and translate the english text into your language of choice .. then you contact me with your prepared effort and give me directions regarding sentence-structure. So I can put in all those "weird" percent-sign thingies and dollar-sign stuff. What those basically do is ensure that even though in english you say "I am a player" another language might be wanting to say "A player am I" .. get it?!
If the message is a simple sentence it's not going to occur, or be important - but if it's something with a couple of colour-assignments on the way then it's going to be crucial!
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#4
Is it possible to do a playertext translator? I guess it would be reaaaally hard.
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#5
(16 Oct 11, 02:46AM)Cemer Wrote: Is it possible to do a playertext translator? I guess it would be reaaaally hard.

The way a lot of translators like google translate work would cause a lot of problems when implementing something like that (this should explain why).
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#6
more importantly, many things we say in game can't be properly translated anyway, mostly because of all the typos that result when you are trying to type something while being shot at.
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#7
cant u just use google translate?
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#8
I will try for Korean if AssaultCube text engine implementation allows for some extended UTF planes (such as East-Asian scripts)
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#9
(16 Oct 11, 05:50AM)Jg99 Wrote: cant u just use google translate?

Asides from the obvious reasons for why not, I'm sure there are copyright issues regarding google's software.

-_-
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#10
Copyright issues? How the hell would Google know we used their translator? But anyways, it is always better to have a person do the translation manually than depending on a program/computer/website/etc.
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#11
(16 Oct 11, 06:50AM)|BC|Wolf Wrote: Copyright issues? How the hell would Google know we used their translator? But anyways, it is always better to have a person do the translation manually than depending on a program/computer/website/etc.

google knows everything, but just so you know, this thread is about asking people to translate parts of the game that have already been written. If you want to talk about this, which would be completely separate to what flowtron is asking for help with, go ahead and do it in another thread.
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#12
I won't promise anything, since i have quite a lot of work to do, but i'll try to start translating it to portuguese.
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#13
bud+gud there used to be TTF-support implemented, which would've allowed just that - but it was turned off due to some issues with colours and such. So currently the only characters that can be used is the basic ASCII-range (not even full ASCII!!!) represented in the packages/misc/chars_default.png. For german-Umlauts "äöüß" I used the, well established, rewrites like "ä"=>"ae".
And again - if there actually were some translations available there might be a new effort made to fully implement the TTF-support .. without them the ASCII-selection works well enough.
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#14
I am more than happy to help with a French version of it, tbh when I read the topic title I though it would have be a much more bigger and complex task.
As you mentioned "sentence structures", in French they are the other way round compare to English, in French too you have special characters like "àâéèùç" but I suppose I would be able to avoid them, anyhow I'll give it a try and see how it goes.
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#15
I'm IN. Count on me for the Italian thing.
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#16
Seems pretty cool. Would we download the language file separately? And could we get a menu to switch between them?

TRANSLATE ALL THINGS
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#17
(16 Oct 11, 02:40PM)Cemer Wrote: Seems pretty cool. Would we download the language file separately? And could we get a menu to switch between them?

TRANSLATE ALL THINGS

Between you and me there too I am totally willing to help with, translating the whole thing!

Kinda "select your language" when uploading the game.

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#18
I could improve the german translation.
Do you have no time for this, Flowtron?
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#19
I've started a translation to Swedish.

I'm wondering about the string:
"removing server \"%cs%s%cr\" from favourites category '%cs%s%cr' (rest '%s')"

what does (rest '%s') mean in this context? restore? sleep? restructure? ...?

I've written the file with umlauts (åäö) included, since it seems better to keep the correct version as a source.
If only basic ascii is available I would suggest using:
s/å/a/
s/ä/a/
s/ö/o/

Since it is (my opinion) much more readable to Swedish people to simply omit them, rather than using aa, ae, oe.

...And keep the original version for when those characters may be available.

I also noticed a bunch of equivalent strings using formatstring, copystring, menutitle, etc. instead of conoutf(), I guess those are intended to be included eventually?
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#20
I will help together with wolf to do the spanish version :)
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#21
i got the nigerian translation covered
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#22
(16 Oct 11, 09:37PM)adam Wrote: i got the nigerian translation covered

We already have one for the official language of Nigeria (English)
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#23
Huasa translation, all of our people have not learned english yet
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#24
It would be interesting to have the game in Portuguese BR.

:D
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#25
is it the final central resource file for AC ? So if i will translate it, the game will be localized to czech ?


Edit:
i translated it but it has only 500 lines...

AC_Czech.pot - 10.6 KB

i would like to test it, which version of AC should i use ?

in czech we also use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1250

in the text is wrong
"deemed" - should be "seemed" probably

and sometimes the sentences repeated

the first one cp1250 version, here is UTF8 version of file AC_Czech.pot - 10.9 KB
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#26
Awww both swedish and czech is taken :( i guess i cant do anything :(
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#27
@angel
you can check my translation ...
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#28
Italian is ready.

But like Alien, I want to test it too, because some words can be hardly translated, and it all depends on the context it is used in (Italian is a nasty language)
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#29
Well, ATM we only have support for the basic ASCII table. 33-126.
So any encoded stuff is basically going to need a rewrite. Source Code or Translation File. Whether I manage to revive and fix the UTF/TTF-code I can't say for sure ATM.

I guess I'll definitely need to update the .po-contents .. possibly after having a run through the source and flagging even more stuff for translation. Also the CubeScript should be taken a stab at.
The last time I was on the lookout for translators nothing much happened, so TBH, I'm now a bit overwhelmed - happily so - but please, give me some time to do what I said more translations would bring: more translatability .. and possibly even proper language support (read: UTF-8)!

Oh, and don't feel a "language is taken"; a team-effort can be much more well rounded - Apollo gave me some input for the german translation. It's the thing that you sometimes can "imagine" the sentence-snippets being stuck together, but then you see it during a game and wonder what the hell you were thinking at the time :-P

To use your locale-file you need to compile it from .po to .mo - a basic shell-script is in source/local/de_compile_mo.[sh/bat]. What you "just" have to do is replace the "de"-occurences with your language-code, say "pt" for portuguese, and save it under the appropriate name, run it and then run your game - as long as your system is actually set to that locale for true, it'll work - you'll see the output in the log "current locale: ...". On *nix-systems you can just enter "locale" into your shell to see the enviroment-variables set - (LANG and) LC_ALL (usually empty) are the significant ones. Hence ACwiki:play in EN although your in DE. HTH
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#30
Spanish version. If someone can test it please do it and tell me if something needs to be fixed.
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