Localization management software

[de1irium]

Hello,

Is there any chance that the team considers a localization management software? Of course, the current state of strings in a proprietary format puts a stop to this effort. Is there any chance that the team considers leveling the translations to the industry standards? Plus, such softwares include tools in order to extract strings from source code. Is there any chance that the team considers providing us with all the strings to translate out of the box?

I do even wish to mention plurals plus genders that happen in languages other than english and make translations very perfect.

Thanks,

[David]

Thanks for your suggestion. We can explore ways to modernize the translation method if you are interested in contributing to the translation. Currently the biggest obstacle is that most translations are using translate.txt files which replaces game text. If this is replaced with a more systematic approach that extracts every text string used in the game to a localization management software, it will require lots of manual efforts to do that for each language version. So unless we find volunteers willing to help us to do that, the plan is quite difficult to execute. If you have the kind intention of contributing to this, please let me know and we can discuss further. Thanks.

[de1irium]

Hello,

so all is about AI translation. It can handle most very well. That'd save contributors a ton of time.

But we need proper key and value disambiguation. When the software sees [0001]<VERS>Version %1s|, it should read that [0001]<VERS> is a key and Version %1s is the string. Then we can send the string to an API to get translated.

Thus I was thinking that if t_game was to be reformated, so could it be of translate.txt.
First, softwares aren't friendly with editing files.
Second, why find the strings when they are (reasonably) to be found somewhere (the code?)

Another reach would be the centralization of all translation efforts.

What do you think?

[David]

Actually, it is already using AI for translations. But AI cannot do abbreviations automatically. They don't know whether the display space is limited and if the original text needs to be converted into abbreviations in order to fit into the limited display space.

But it is going to be a big project for converting the current format to the new format. The most time consuming part is to check and verify all the text in the game to make sure that they are displayed properly. So unless we find volunteers willing to help us on this, the current method of translation, though not ideal, nevertheless still serves the game well.

[paulwoman]

Note that I'm “centralizing” a localization system for the game and that we're coordinating on https://discord.gg/7DVXZ5x

We use https://omegat.org for t_game files and a googlesheet

The advantage of this system is that you only need to update the files for the software to detect the parts that still need translating, and you can easily “go back” to an old version if you wish.

1) the team provides the files with what needs to be translated into the game exe.
2) If we detect phrases that are not in the files, we put the words in another file dedicated to this part.

[de1irium]

Please take a quick look at this article explaining extraction:
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/devel/gettext.html

[David]

Please take a quick look at this article explaining extraction:
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/devel/gettext.html

Thanks for the link. I've forwarded it to the dev team. They updated me that they have already developed a similar tool for text extraction and it has been used for extracting the text for the new features and content in version 11.0 and the Service Industry DLC.

The latest v11.0.40 installer contains the translated text for extracted text.