Xenonauts languages

[a333]

Even if someone was to write a tool to create mvec fonts from scratch, we've got to consider how the Xenonauts font will support special characters given it is in all capitals. Is that going to be an issue?

Depends on the situation, but almost certainly it can be done. Let me look at the font file please (ttf one).

[Safaquel]

Won't you be open for bugs and hacks and crashes if you add those symbols? Doesn't the script language use them for purposes of synthax?

Anyway I think we'll go ahead with Research Tree translation then as soon as you go beta.

[a333]

Won't you be open for bugs and hacks and crashes if you add those symbols? Doesn't the script language use them for purposes of synthax?

English language use them for the same purproses. And though i've encountered a lot of bugs and crashes trying to read some sentences, no one was able to hack my brain yet.

Jokes aside, your fears not to be confirmed. Script is the set of commands, and this font will be used for data entries. Read more about this if you're interested. The only crash that is possible here is when the font does not contain a corresponding symbol. Which Chris is trying to fix.

So what's the bottomline?

Bottomline is that i can add special characters (and even cyrillics, given time). But one problem persists: converting from good old ttf to the Playground proprietary format. The only group of people i know of owning tool we need are some russian casual game translators, and they've yet to answer my e-mails. Depending on the consequences, i'll either get the hold of swf2mvec or will have to write my own tool.

Edited March 22, 2013 by a333

[Chris]

If the font doesn't contain a corresponding symbol, it defaults to the Arial font I think. That's why the $ symbol still appears in the game, even though it's not in the Xenonaut font. It means it's the wrong size, though.

a333 - just sent you a PM about the Xenonaut font .ttf

[a333]

Poorgress (ha-ha) report:

Added cyrillic symbols to the Xenonauts font.

preview:

after some tinkering:

New game, Load, Options can't be changed despite their presence in the strings.xml. Need some help with this.

Can't get rid of space after the first checkbox too.

TTF produced by FontForge are converting without problems. Case unknown.

I was reading the ttf format specifications and now have those weird dreams when you are a letter and must defend your alphabet from alien letters.

Search for the adequate converter continues.

[Chris]

Some of the text is hardcoded, either in the actual code or in the style .xmls in /scripts/. We can do some work on moving them all to strings.xml in beta.

Remember the entire UI is going to be replaced in beta too...

[a333]

Oh, i didn't plan any actual translating work, just paving the way. I'll post here from time to time, to keep people informed.

What languages do you plan to support, by the way? I can add some more symbols, if there will not be chinese.

[Chris]

By far the most interest we've had is for Russian and German translations. After that, potentially French / Spanish.

[a333]

After some more hours of wtf, i finally pinpointed a problem. If anyone will ever need the solution, it's under the spoiler.

Playmate Font Maker 1.01 bugged symbols

The tool can't stomach glyph links. Glyph link is basically a shortcut to another glyph, and it doesnt contain any actual vector data. In good fonts all similar letters like Greek/Cyrillic A, B, etc, are linked to their corresponding english twins to save some bytes. Same goes for the complex letters like Ë, Î, Ñ.

So, that's what you do:

1. Download any font editor (Fontforge will do, and it's free).

2. Open your ttf.

3. Ctrl-A will select all the glyphs, then click the right mouse button on any, and chose "Unlink Reference". All links will be exchanged for a copied vector data.

4. File -> Generate Fonts, format: TrueType, No Bitmap Fonts, uncheck the validation (sometimes it causes CTD and will produce unneeded warnings). There you go. Now install the new ttf, be sure to select it in the Font Maker (if the font you installing was already present in system, you'll see the new font as fontname_0.ttf).

5. Convert and check. You're done.

Here is the screenshot:

So, yeah. If Chris will kindly confirm that font file is working, then we can say localisation is possible for any language.

Edited March 28, 2013 by a333

[Safaquel]

Thank you for uploading the symbols, this is a way forward indeed.

Looks like we'll have to make some translator decisions within a week.

[Schnittertm]

So, I played around a bit today and I found that at least for German it is much easier to get the few special letters that we use in the german language. Just put in the corresponding xml ascii code for the specific letter (e.g. Ä for Ä) and it will render nicely in game.

As an example here are a few screens with a rough translation into German:

Please note, that the current research project is 'AAGH! Help, the ET's want to eat us.'

Just put that in there to test what would happen if I changed the string.

[a333]

So, I played around a bit today and I found that at least for German it is much easier to get the few special letters that we use in the german language. Just put in the corresponding xml ascii code for the specific letter (e.g. Ä for Ä) and it will render nicely in game.

Chris told somewhere earlier about it. The symbols you see are missing in the original font, so the game takes them from the arial. If you look closely, they are clearly out of style.

I'm adding this special symbols in the original font, and also several others which are missing in arial too. If you can list all the umlaut and special letters which are needed, this will help me greatly.

[Schnittertm]

Chris told somewhere earlier about it. The symbols you see are missing in the original font, so the game takes them from the arial. If you look closely, they are clearly out of style.

I'm adding this special symbols in the original font, and also several others which are missing in arial too. If you can list all the umlaut and special letters which are needed, this will help me greatly.

I did notice that Arial is used and while it does look out of place it's quite alright for a short demonstration.

As for letters needed for German, you'd just have to add in Ä,Ö, Ü and ß, those are the only exceptions used in German in comparison to English. The first three should be very easy, as you'd just need to add two dots at the right place only the 'eszet' is a bit harder, as it is would have to be created anew.

There might be a case made, too, for É, as it is sometimes used in a few foreign adapted words like Café, but it is also permissible in German to right it without the accent (e.g. Cafe). Though I guess if there is a French translation made, they might need it.

[a333]

Okay, thank you.

One more thing:

Just put in the corresponding xml ascii code for the specific letter (e.g. Ä for Ä) and it will render nicely in game.

While the strings.xml encoded with UTF-8 it should be possible to write Ä inside of a string without any codes.

< and > would be harder to display since these are used to put text formatting xml inside the string xml, i guess.

[Safaquel]

O-kay. so where exactly do we go from here on out?

Do I just get to work on the files I got and then post them, or do we do it differently?

[Schnittertm]

O-kay. so where exactly do we go from here on out?

Do I just get to work on the files I got and then post them, or do we do it differently?

That is a very good question.

I don't know where we go on from here. For me it actually doesn't matter if there is a German translation or not, as I usually play any foreign language games in English and my command of English is good enough that I do have grasp of what is going on.

But I also do understand that there are a lot of other Germans that would prefer to have version in their native language (well German is my native language), as they either don't want to learn or don't care enough about the English language to actually bother with anything else than a German language version.

Currently, because I think I was bored, I have translated the about 50% of the lines in the scripts.xml (at least according to my Vim text editor). For now it is a very rough translation and I don't even know why I did it. There are certainly a few things that would have to be decided on before a full scale translation is made, however. For example, should the English names of the planes, tanks, equipment be kept where possible or should they be germanified? F-17 Condor or Kondor, Avalanche Torpedo or Lawine Torpedo, Extraterrestrische or Aliens? This stuff is important from more than one standpoint, but immersion being the main goal and a bad translation can be an immersion breaker.

Then there is the testing, that is something that definitely can not be done by the translator alone, you'd need several people to test it. Both because of strings being too long for the place they should go in or because of mistakes or even strings that can be mistranslated, because they are just there without context. I found the string 'Executed' on its own and this can, depending on context have several translations in German (e.g. Exekutiert, Ausgeführt) with different meanings.

Well, it will have to be decided upon at some point in the future. Translation could be done alongside the beta, though.

[Safaquel]

Some of your concerns go for Russian version as well, hence the question.

Would like to hear Chris's opinion on this, and also possibly on how some of the names for the aliens were chosen (if there was a particular cultural reference, it might not be noticed by a translator).

Either way I think we will have reasonable translation milestones by monday or tuesday, which I will post here.

[a333]

It depends on what Chris is planning to do with localisation.

When i'll finish with the fonts, and developers will take out what's left of the text in code to the xml, most of the languages will be available for localisation simply by translating xmls.

Other languages, like Chinese, will be probably rogue-translated due to complexity and raw glyph count.

Who will translate these xmls is a question. I can help with Russian, but certainly there are people who can do it better and willing to.

Maybe Chris will hire some professional translators, maybe he'll trust it to the community. Then you will know what to do.

I think this should be paused for now. Devs have other priorities, plus some content will probably be redone. And work will be wasted.

Edited March 30, 2013 by a333

[Safaquel]

I think this should be paused for now. Devs have other priorities, plus some content will probably be redone. And work will be wasted.

Nah, it never is quite wasted, there isn't going to be a serious overhaul this time around. I think what is going to happen is some changes to descriptions, some added content, some altered xenopedia passages, but by and large that'd be it. Most of those things can be done and re-done within a day, especially if most translator decisions are already made by the time.

There is a bit of additional work in patch-notes, if these are to be translated into russian, a decision of which I am a proponent of.

It's not much work, but one we cannot do without Chris's approval and contact.

Right now I am banking on the assumption that by the beta-release 90-95% of the text elements in the game will already be implemented. Translating those would then involve making 95-98% of global translator decisions, and we could just implement the changes as soon as they appear in the english version, or within a day, tops.

I'm not sure if it's worth mentioning here, but I have been working as a translator/interpreter for some time now, freelance, which I suppose makes me a professional (people have vastly different views on this, surprisingly).

Edited March 30, 2013 by Safaquel

[a333]

I can tell when i see some of your work, not earlier. But the way you are thinking about the translation already qualifies you as knowledgeable.

Last word is for Chris, though.

[Safaquel]

I have an approximation of the workload, will post milestones right here later in the day.

I project the complete volume of translatable text to be about 300 000 digits without blank spaces.

Pure typing should take about 83 hours with the complete version of the file, and that's realistic.

Optimistic prognosis is 60-65 hours.

Pessimistic prognosis doesn't deal with hours at all.

That is pure typing, not taking thinking time and assessment into account.

[Schnittertm]

I have an approximation of the workload, will post milestones right here later in the day.

I project the complete volume of translatable text to be about 300 000 digits without blank spaces.

Pure typing should take about 83 hours with the complete version of the file, and that's realistic.

Optimistic prognosis is 60-65 hours.

Pessimistic prognosis doesn't deal with hours at all.

That is pure typing, not taking thinking time and assessment into account.

I don't know how it is with Russian, as that is what you are going for, but for German I'd have to at least estimate an increase in digits of about 20-25% without thinking. With thinking it won't be much less text, but I've already seen areas where I would have to rethink on how I would want to convey certain things in game, as the German translation just does not fit.

Then again, I think the start of the beta would be the best time to have a translation prototype at the start, as there will be people available that can test them and give feedback on where the translation is lacking or causing problems.

The only problem right now is, that we do not know what Chris has planned for any of the translation. Has he already hired people to do a German or French translation, as he hinted in some posts? Does he want to hire a professional translator after release to do that? What kind of job would that translator do? I ask this last question, because I've read quite a few books in German that had an original English language release and found some of them quite lacking, as the translator was just a translator but not someone familiar with the subject matter at hand. I remember some old Warhammer 40,000 novels, where the translator made up a german name for one of the Space Marine chapters, even though in all german publications by Games Workshop themselves the chapter names were (and still are) only in English.

Well, if Chris is interested in commuity translation, made by the community for the community I certainly could help with the German one. Right now my prototype of the strings.xml that I do mostly for myself is coming along nicely. I'm not a professional translator by any means, but since I've been living in the US for a year almost 20 years back and have been using and listening to the English language since then quite extensively I can use it almost as good as a native speaker, meaning I think in English when I use English. That alone has to count for something, I believe.

Oh well, we'll have to wait for Chris to answer our questions.

[Safaquel]

Well, here's the news.

I have the projected figures and milestones for the russian translation, and an approach in mind. You can approximate the timeline from there.

The whole project roughly translates into three stages, two of which (II and III) can be done simultaneously by a group of people with minimal interdependence.

A short explanation of the draft approach used below:

Draft 1: Possibly publishable draft which, though, may not be optimal from the point of view of style or immersion, or may contain basic spelling mistakes.

Draft 2: Aesthetical, stylistic and grammatic corrections are applied where necessary to Draft 1 upon review.

Draft Final: A draft where the translation is finalized and set, and not subject to furhter changes.

Admittedly there might be a draft 3 somewhere in there, or Draft 0 (something the end user should not see, ever), but by and large we try to avoid this kind of thing.

The stages are as follows:

Stage 0.

This is where a kind of pre-work happens. This is where we actually think about the project and how we use the words, and which words we would use rather than others, and make a mental picture of all the translator decisions we will be making.

To do here:

* Assess workload

* Conduct research into military style written documents

* Think and choose a possible style for the russian translation

* List the translation options for character statistics and primary strings (i.e. world map, start menu, options and base menus)

Stage I. Preproduction.

This is a preliminary stage which will allow us to work on strings and xenopedia entries separately.

To do here:

* Choose translation for all primary unit stats

* Choose translation for all race and weapon names

* Document or at least make note of all the strings relative to their position in the game context

* Choose a general approach to translating plurals

* Implement the choices made by translating most visible strings (world map, base construction, research, main menu)

Milestones:

1. Position of all the strings in the game and their context is clear and noted

2. Listed choices are all made and may be interpreted as a guideline for translation

Stage II. String translation.

This is where we actually translate all the strings.

Current Strings.xml file contains roughly 59k digits of translatable text.

Since I would like to do this with drafting approach, milestones will probably be 20k digit chunks of text, and look like this:

Milestones:

1: Draft 1 of Batch 1 (20k digits);

2: Draft 1 of Batch 2 (20k digits);

3: Draft 1 of Batch 3 (20k digits); Draft 2 of Batch 1;

4: Draft 2 of Batch 2; Draft 2 of Batch 3;

5: Draft Final of Batches 1, 2 and 3. Draft Final is the one version of the translation that will not be changed and will go into the final version of the game, unless the original text is changed.

I think we will arrive to Final draft state much sooner for most of the strings, as there are only so many ways of translating Baghdad or September, but there are some trickier strings that will require drafting and playtesting.

Stage III. Xenopedia translation.

The current Xenopedia contains 111 entries and some of those descriptions have yet to be written. However each entry is a size-able chunk of text (ranging from a bit under 1800 digits to about 3k), so this can be segmented any old how.

Since I'd like to do the draft approach on this one, I think these should be sub-divided into categories.

The milestones, hence, look like this:

Milestones:

1: Draft 1 of all racial autopsies;

2: Draft 1 of all ballistic weaponry;

3: Draft 1 of all basic vehicles and fighters;

4: Draft 1 of all alien weaponry;

5: Draft 1 of all laser weaponry; Draft 2 of all racial autopsies

6: Draft 1 of all alien vivisections; Draft 2 of all ballistic weaponry

7: Draft 1 of all alien interrogations; Draft 2 of all basic vehicles and fighters

8: Draft 1 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all alien weaponry;

9: Draft 1 of all UFO analyses; Draft 2 of all laser weaponry;

10: Draft 1 of all tank types; Draft 2 of all alien vivisections;

11: Draft 1 of all uncategorized research; Draft 2 of all alien interrogations;

12: Draft 2 of all armor research; Draft 2 of all UFO analyses;

13: Draft Final of any 6 of any categories;

14: Draft Final of all Xenopedia entries.

This will probably look a bit different in practice, but that largely depends on how the beta will progress.

Now for the timeline.

If I commit full-time to this project, I can probably do it in six weeks' time, if I work alone. A second translator would probably cut this time to 5 weeks or a month (depending on how good the man is and how compatible our styles), and yet another translator could reasonably get us into three weeks' deadline.

Optimistic prognosis says the project is doable in 4 weeks.

P.S. I have been adding information to this post by editing so as not to accidentaly delete it all. Thank you for bearing with me.

Edited April 1, 2013 by Safaquel

[Schnittertm]

Okay, thank you.

One more thing:

While the strings.xml encoded with UTF-8 it should be possible to write Ä inside of a string without any codes.

< and > would be harder to display since these are used to put text formatting xml inside the string xml, i guess.

I tried this, put the line encoding="UTF-8" is in the top line (

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8559-1"?>

), but it does not render the German specific character. Even tried it with ISO-8559-1 enconding for western european languages. Doesn't do it there either.

Either I'm doing something wrong or the game just doesn't like to render those character. For now I'm working with the ASCII codes, although sometimes it seems to produce a funny error, doubling everything of the word up to and including the special character. Thing is, it only does it rarely and I have yet to find a pattern on when it does this and why.

[a333]

P.S. I have been adding information to this post by editing so as not to accidentaly delete it all. Thank you for bearing with me.

That's what is this thread for. Though large chunks of text could use some structuring with the spoiler tag.

I tried this, put the line encoding="UTF-8" is in the top line

That's not needed. Just set the encoding into UTF-8 in your text editor. Notepad does this in save menu, more advanced editors could switch the encoding on the fly via menu. Then just copypaste this symbol into the string like this:

<Data ss:Type="String">ÄÄÄÄÄ</Data>

I've just checked it, works perfectly.