Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF Suggestions => Topic started by: darkomen on July 04, 2010, 07:12:54 am
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Hi all,
Im a french player from french community, so , sorry for my bad english.
This request is about Internationalization( see also the Article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization)) of DF. In fact, i think that the most problem for non-english people to learn playing DF, isn't the Interface of the game graphics but is the only language of the game. It's really( ! ) hard to translate name of objects ingame, menus, help and other texts ingame and all non-english people spend many time on it.
I18n ( = Internationalization) of DF permit development of non-english communities(japanese, french, german, russian etc..)
If some files are free to translate, like txt files, some other files, like grammar files are compiled and the source code isn't open. A library like Gettext (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext) can help community to translate this files.
So, that i suggest is:
- Opening the source of All the language files, including grammar files and menus to permit the translation
- Making a Webtranslator with the gettext library or another method to permit to the community translation of the game in many different languages. (like HERE (http://simutranslator.simutrans-germany.com/) or HERE (http://translator.openttd.org/en/))
- Translating the files of all the game
- Replacing the original language files by the traduced files by
-Making patches
OR
-Making an official and multilingual version of DF
OR
-Making many versions of DF in the different languages.
Most of the work can be do by the community, like 2, 3 and 4 steps, so i think Toady don't have much work to do that. ;)
I'm not a programmer, so i don't think that i can help for i18n of the game, but i can help later, for traducing the game in french.
Thank you to read me =)
What do you think about that?
Thanks to give your opinion ;)
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This is planned for the future. Until then, everyone must play in English or not at all. However, I think this is a relatively low priority, because most people in the civilized world understand English to some degree.
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It's also a low priority because a lot of changes are being made at this stage in development, and rapid changes will continue to take place until a much more stable period of development (read: close to 1.0). There's virtually no point creating translations for a game when the ingame text might change every few weeks.
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However It will probably be 2034 (if you look at his goals and what has been done) before he will finish so I think these are things that shouldn't be delayed till then. On the other hand I often find games that use my native language (dutch) sound quite weird. For some reason a dragon sounds kind of cool while a draak sounds like something little childeren are told about.
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However It will probably be 2034 (if you look at his goals and what has been done) before he will finish so I think these are things that shouldn't be delayed till then. On the other hand I often find games that use my native language (dutch) sound quite weird. For some reason a dragon sounds kind of cool while a draak sounds like something little childeren are told about.
Not my fault if in german translation of dragon is "draak" ;D
French translation of Dragon is Dragon, and french language sounds very well, thank you :) . Voltaire, Molière, Victor hugo and many famous french autors don't sounds like something little childeren are told about :P
I know that there are many goals, and i also know that in a future( what future? ) the game will be i18nized.
But in my opinion, it's not a "Low priority", because DF gameplay is enough mature to develop just a little accessibility of DF. And the language is the first way to develop it
because most people in the civilized world understand English to some degree.
Seriously, if i can understand easily your posts and i can write english a little, i CANT understand anything in Dwarf fortress: Vocabulary is VERY rich and word are not currently-used words. Without help(from MagmaWiki or the french wiki), i can't play DF.
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I think it would would be a reasonably easy task for all the names/menus of everything ingame to be put into .txt files that could be edited. That would be the easiest way of making the game accessible in any language. Just have the game pull all the menus and such from .txt files.
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I think it would would be a reasonably easy task for all the names/menus of everything ingame to be put into .txt files that could be edited. That would be the easiest way of making the game accessible in any language. Just have the game pull all the menus and such from .txt files.
and let the modders translate the game into the languages of the countries which find DF popular.
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However It will probably be 2034 (if you look at his goals and what has been done) before he will finish so I think these are things that shouldn't be delayed till then. On the other hand I often find games that use my native language (dutch) sound quite weird. For some reason a dragon sounds kind of cool while a draak sounds like something little childeren are told about.
That's a chicken and egg problem: as long as dutch fantasy terms are used for children's stories exclusively, they'll naturally sound childish. To cure yourself, read some Dutch versions of fantasy novels like Robin Hobb's trilogies or even better original Dutch fantasy; I can recommend Peter Schaap's "De schrijvenaar van Thyll", for example.
More in general: many sentences are cobbled together ad-hoc according to simplified English grammar. Translating that would require quite some coding too, not just replacing a text file.
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Right now you can translate some parts by adjusting the raws, but full translations will have to wait.
There is also the problem that some short english sentences could be very long in other languages, thus failing to fit into the UI.
Translating to any asian languages would cause even more problems as the whole ascii system would have to be replaced.
Arabic languages should be possible with just an alternative tileset.
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The problem here is not the transcription of words from one language to another, the problem is each language has different grammar. All generated texts... eg. ingame messages, combat reports, adventure mode dialogs would be very difficult to handle. The engine is written with English grammar in mind, which makes it next to impossible to translate... without heavy reworking of the engine.
Word order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order), genders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender), and worst of all, declension (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension) (just look at my native language - Czech - declesion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension) and skim through the tables) are almost impossible to implement - I can't think of any different approach then to use a complete dictionary (but such dictionaries would probably be hard to get), or to manually write all forms of all words you use in the game (no translator would want to do that). Different to explain if you don't know any other languages than English, but if you do, you know what I'm talking about.
Ease of translation is being taken into account in most modern blockbuster games, and the engine is written to accommodate different languages. But other games have it very easy, they rarely generate texts - in 99 % they simply use fixed text strings. Dwarf Fortress? Well... I don't believe Toady will ever be able to make it translatable. He'll probably just realize how much rewriting it would mean and resign.
What's doable are all the fixed texts (like menus or k-z descriptions). Then coding some easy half-assed system for generated texts like combat reports or in-game messages that make translation at least tolerable, though not correct.
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all code is in english(important code at least) therefore it makes sense for developers to go to english until the program is stable enough for the tinkering required.
besides, you are replying in english, what are you complaining about?
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Another problem with localising it would be the translation of certain terms.
Like, take the term Mountainhomes.
In Dutch that would become 'Bergthuis' which sounds really silly because it's singular(there's no specific multiple form for home in Dutch).
So you'd have to find an alternative. Like... 'Thuisgebergten' (Homemountains/Homemountainrange)
Or 'Berg gehucht'(MountainHamlet) 'Berg burchten'(Mountain Fortresses) 'Berg paleizen'(Mountain Palaces).
And not to even start on things like goblins and kobolds.(In the Dutch translation of Harry Potter the goblins at gringotts were translated as kobolds)
Dwarf Fortress would ofcourse become Dwergen Burcht :)
Another problem would be that English as it stands today doesn't have a polite form or at the least a polite form similar to other European languages.
This may not matter much as the player is rarely adressed directly, but it would become diffucult when generated ingame writing will be produced. (I think it would be weird to a lot of people when the characters are just using the familiar form with everyone they meet, from their own children to their king).
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This is a pretty interesting discussion. One of the things that biologists catch a lot of flack from other disciplines about is that we coin a lot of words (necessarily). These words usually seem to be Anglo-Latin/Greek constructions that are built from previous neologisms, so you get "taxonomies" like gene-->genome-->proteome-->metabolome. Even if most scientists aren't native English speakers, English is the lingua franca of science, so it's the sandbox that this word-construction takes place in.
The fantasy genre is another area where you get a lot of words being coined and mashed together to create terms to describe things that have never before been described. Because a lot of the seminal fantasy fiction (in the modern tradition, I guess, since every culture has a body of folklore) was written in English (i.e., Tolkien), does that make the verbal sandbox of fantasy fiction also heavily English-leaning?
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Everybody should learn to speak and write english, anyway. ;)
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all code is in english(important code at least) therefore it makes sense for developers to go to english until the program is stable enough for the tinkering required.
besides, you are replying in english, what are you complaining about?
Internationalization =/= translation
Another problem with localising it would be the translation of certain terms.
Like, take the term Mountainhomes.
In Dutch that would become 'Bergthuis' which sounds really silly because it's singular(there's no specific multiple form for home in Dutch).
So you'd have to find an alternative. Like... 'Thuisgebergten' (Homemountains/Homemountainrange)
Or 'Berg gehucht'(MountainHamlet) 'Berg burchten'(Mountain Fortresses) 'Berg paleizen'(Mountain Palaces).
And not to even start on things like goblins and kobolds.(In the Dutch translation of Harry Potter the goblins at gringotts were translated as kobolds)
This isn't really Toady's problem, is it? It's the translators job! 8) Translation isn't transferring the text 1:1, it almost always includes making compromises, using different terms, coming up with your own words. As for Chthonic's question - it depends heavily on the translator's quality. Some simply keep the English words, some come up with their own or find similarities in local folklore. We have a brilliant Czech translation of the Lord of the Rings, for example, and the lady who translated it made up amazing and naturally sounding creature names or Hobbit names. (But the Czech fantasy norm is heavily based on English, yes. We mostly use English creature names, with only slight changes sometimes to make them easier to pronounce. That's because fantasy comes in the form of computer games (people used to play only in English, though translations are lately becoming frequent) and bad books (long live the Warhammer) translated by horrible translators.)
The only problem from the perspective of Toady I can think of is the way names are created, and how names are translated from dwarven/elvish/etc. to english. Basically, it just takes two random dwarven words, puts them together and transfers both to English (so you have surnames like Clasplashes, Keygem). This works in Germanic languages, I suppose, but not eg. in "our" Slavic languages. You can't just mash any two words together, in fact, mashing words together is very rare compared to English. If you did that, it would sound very weird. Not weird as "Clasplashes", but weird as in "totally ungrammatical" or "outright wrong". And I have no idea how to handle this.
To elaborate:
English "Clasp" + "Lashes" = "Clasplashes"
Czech "Mihotat" + "Řasy" (direct translation) = Řasomih (it sounds horribly, but could be taken with a grain of salt because it's "translation from dwarvish")
English "Key" + "Gem" = "Keygem"
Czech "Klíč" + "drahokam" = Klíčodrahokam (easy, but sounds horrible), more probably "Drahoklíč" (sounds strange), most probably "Klíčový drahokam" or "Drahokamový klíč" (making one of the words adjective, which could actually be simple)
The problem you'd have to code the grammar rules for creating names in languages that can't use simple mashing. Which would require a lot of time and a good knowledge of the target language. I know the names are a very minor part and could be ignored (= done badly) but perhaps Toady could somehow export the grammatical rules to raws and let us program our own? It's the only solution I can think of.
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The funny thing about that is that a number of the game's random compound constructions (like "clasplashes") also sound very strange to a NES's ears.
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Not sure if this has changed in newer versions, but you could translate at least language files, so the selected race would "use" the language (the grammar would be broken, but it is something).
I recall there were some translations, I myself did translation to Czech. It is uploaded somewhere on df file depot.
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all code is in english(important code at least) therefore it makes sense for developers to go to english until the program is stable enough for the tinkering required.
besides, you are replying in english, what are you complaining about?
Internationalization =/= translation
Another problem with localising it would be the translation of certain terms.
Like, take the term Mountainhomes.
In Dutch that would become 'Bergthuis' which sounds really silly because it's singular(there's no specific multiple form for home in Dutch).
So you'd have to find an alternative. Like... 'Thuisgebergten' (Homemountains/Homemountainrange)
Or 'Berg gehucht'(MountainHamlet) 'Berg burchten'(Mountain Fortresses) 'Berg paleizen'(Mountain Palaces).
And not to even start on things like goblins and kobolds.(In the Dutch translation of Harry Potter the goblins at gringotts were translated as kobolds)
This isn't really Toady's problem, is it? It's the translators job! 8) Translation isn't transferring the text 1:1, it almost always includes making compromises, using different terms, coming up with your own words.
I know that proper localisation requires a bit of creativity. But as the anime-culture has shown us, there's a lot of people out there who think that if a word isn't a literal translation, it's a bad translation. Furthermore, you would want to have someone who is as fluent in the English language as well as the native language(seriously, I have seen some absolutely atrocious Dutch translations done by Dutch people), because otherwise the subtilities in the text are lost.
So the problem is not so much in Toady's hand as it is in the people who will translate it.
Though, when it comes to the generated text, I'm pretty certain most of it is composed out of static string with only some words replaced. Which means that in theory Toady just tells the computer that there is a string that goes 'This is a [quality] [medium] of [personname] the [race]' etcetera.
Ah, to Chthonic. The problem is not so much the lack of terms, but rather that English fantasy has certain standards and clichés associated with fantasy terms, while in other languages this is not as strong.
Like, take Artemis Fowl. There's Elves and Pixies and Fairies in that series. This doesn't translate well.This is mostly because language wise Pixie and Elf are synonyms in English and therefore also in the translations. So when translating it, the Author used 'Elven' and 'Elfjes'. The later is not only confusing because it's a dimunitive of the former, but also because it's the Dutch translation of Fairy. Fairies, in place, got named 'winged elves'(Which is double confusing because they could've used 'Fee' as well).
Similarly, there's the word Kabouter, which is best translated as pixie, but it's usually not done because people think of a carefree young looking creature with pixies, while kabouters (http://altijdeenmening.web-log.nl/mijn_weblog/images/kabouter_15_kopie.jpg) are usually old, wise and bearded.
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The standards and cliches are what I meant, though--in English, since the cliches exist, they're drawn upon and used as source material. Elf and pixie are denotative synonyms, but their connotations--especially in-genre--are very different. I don't know if it works this way exactly, but I would almost stick with the source-language terms in translating folkloric denizens, the way that in English language literature if a non-English-folklore supernatural entity is introduced, authors stick with the original name.
The English equivalent of your kabouter is definitely a gnome--not a D&D gnome, but the . . . garden variety, I guess :)
I don't envy translators their jobs--the introduction to my copy of The Inferno talks about how the translator had to not just preserve the literal and figurative meanings as best as possible, but also keep a sense of the poetry--the stresses and meter. It's almost like composing an entirely new poem (or novel) if it's done well. Lot of creativity.
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I18n ( = Internationalization) of DF permit development of non-english communities(japanese, french, german, russian etc..)
I think this sould be easy to do, simply to but the menues txt and stuff like that with the raw files so that thay can be edited easely for any reason. Perhaps the goblin mod likes to change a few menue names or something.
I would put this to medium priority, I would say that it is more important then for example let Mac using people play the game.
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Who cares about mac users, right. ;D
Personally, I think the bulk of this could be done fairly soon (let's get most of the major bugs worked out of 2010 before undertaking something this ambitious) depending on how Toady handles it. If you simply export the generic nomenclature to text files, a crude form could be worked out by simply having the computer read in the strings and menu settings. You would still run into some nasty grammar issues, of course, but it would be a start. It would beat having to translate it yourself.
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Yeah, only thing that is stopping me from playing DF right now is that I'm in full time Japanese immersion mode (6 months in and counting). It would be great to have a way to translate DF into Japanese. I'm sure it would become v. popular and result in a lot more donations.
There is already awareness on the J. internets....
http://pcgamerslog.blog47.fc2.com/blog-entry-24.html
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/inziladun/20070426/1177522123
"我々は、歴史に残る偉大なゲームの誕生に立ち会っているのかもしれない。"
We may well be looking at the birth of a game that will go down in history.
From the sounds of it translating would not be at all an easy job, and maybe making the conversion to any particular language would require some years of labor from numerous individuals. That said, DF is a game that is worth it. It attracts the kind of devotion required for such effort. The question is, could Toady find a way to make this possible for other people to attempt as some kind of mod.
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I agree with people saying that general knowledge of English wont help you much when playing a DF. Menus are flooded with very uncommon words. I think it may really present a barrier for lot of people (read: potential donators).
I understand that there is lot of dynamically generated stuff, but I assume there are some "quick wins" around in the code (e.g. text in the menus, materials, items). Just make them public and community will do the rest...
But not that I personally really care, I can play it know (after some battle with dictionaries) and community size is not really my business...
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I think this would be a great idea, although I believe that it's best to wait until the presentation arc is being focused on to handle this.
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In light of the TrueType upgrade, would that make kana and other strange characters possibly usable in menus now? I think besides grammatical issues, the character limit was problematic as well, but is it still an issue now?
In my opinion, the only things that really need to be translated for an expanded audience are the more "static" text, like designation menus and such, that don't rely on grammatical structure much. For the most part, there's not a whole lot of text in dwarf that explicitly describe what an item is for or how it's used - most of that information is found in the wiki, which has appeared in other languages already.
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I'm not sure how much this has been mentioned:
DF synthesizes sentences in the creature descriptions, combat reports, and many other places. Because of this, it needs to know grammar, and localizing DF for another language would require localizing those rules as well. Obviously, you don't cut-and-paste together a sentence in English the same as you would in French, Russian, Czech, or any other language. Because of this (and other reasons, like so much of the language/text being hard-coded into the game), localizing the game would be a big programming job, and I'm not sure Toady would want to do that at this point, considering how much the game itself keeps changing.
In my opinion, the only things that really need to be translated for an expanded audience are the more "static" text, like designation menus and such, that don't rely on grammatical structure much. For the most part, there's not a whole lot of text in dwarf that explicitly describe what an item is for or how it's used - most of that information is found in the wiki, which has appeared in other languages already.
The game relies on dynamic text now more than ever, and will likely continue in that direction. See: Combat reports, wound and other descriptions, etc.
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In light of the TrueType upgrade, would that make kana and other strange characters possibly usable in menus now? I think besides grammatical issues, the character limit was problematic as well, but is it still an issue now?
Possibly. It depends whether or not the menu text is hard-coded or in a lookup table that could be turned into another .txt file in the init folder somewhere.
I'd be surprised if the contents of the speech folder couldn't already display properly if translated into Greek or Cryllic as of the latest version, however; it would be almost as easy to add unicode support as it would to leave it out.
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The game relies on dynamic text now more than ever, and will likely continue in that direction. See: Combat reports, wound and other descriptions, etc.
While the game is definitely moving toward dynamic texts, a lot of that is flavor, and the bare basics are mostly static. You're probably right in that combat reports look like they'll have to remain in english. But in regards to the wound screen and creature flavor text, a lot of that can be edited via raws, in addition to noble positions, creature names, body parts, metals, layers, toys, equipment, plants, and some reactions.
You'll be left with weird stuff like "You hack 'foreign word' 1 in the 'foreign word' with your 'foreign word', and the severed part sails off in an arc!" making some weird mad-lib situation, but I think it's at least more accessible than having everything in english. I honestly think that just the barebones of the menu need to be translated to attract a much wider audience, and a lot of the text can be left in english, but that might be a poor guess to make, and I can see why you don't really want to half-ass it.
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The best way to translate DF is probably to export all the text and grammar to raws and let the fan community handle the rest.
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The game relies on dynamic text now more than ever, and will likely continue in that direction. See: Combat reports, wound and other descriptions, etc.
While the game is definitely moving toward dynamic texts, a lot of that is flavor, and the bare basics are mostly static. You're probably right in that combat reports look like they'll have to remain in english. But in regards to the wound screen and creature flavor text, a lot of that can be edited via raws, in addition to noble positions, creature names, body parts, metals, layers, toys, equipment, plants, and some reactions.
You can't edit anything about wounds in the raws, at all. Except maybe the names of a few token things. And the grammar still won't make any sense at all.
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The game relies on dynamic text now more than ever, and will likely continue in that direction. See: Combat reports, wound and other descriptions, etc.
While the game is definitely moving toward dynamic texts, a lot of that is flavor, and the bare basics are mostly static. You're probably right in that combat reports look like they'll have to remain in english. But in regards to the wound screen and creature flavor text, a lot of that can be edited via raws, in addition to noble positions, creature names, body parts, metals, layers, toys, equipment, plants, and some reactions.
You can't edit anything about wounds in the raws, at all. Except maybe the names of a few token things. And the grammar still won't make any sense at all.
Yeah, I got a bit mixed up, and I was talking about the wounds summary when you select a creature with v and w, with the color-coded injuries. I didn't take into account the actual character profiles with t he "*'s left foot in mangled" or whatnot.
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Just in case someone is still following this thread. For several months I'm working on a translation patcher for the Dwarf Fortress game. If anyone intersted, have a look at the following thread: Dwarf Fortress localization patch (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108721)
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Epic necro is epic.
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Epic necro is epic.
Nothing wrong with that.
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Well, this thread is almost two years old. Shouldn't there be a more recent thread of this kind somewhere?
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Well, this thread is almost two years old. Shouldn't there be a more recent thread of this kind somewhere?
How recent it is makes no difference - if this thread had the closest idea to what the poster wanted to talk about, then this was the thread they should have used.
Besides, in the past month, we've had a half-dozen threads come back from 2008 or 2007.
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If someone wants to translate it, I can help. My english is quite good, and I can do some work [for french].
On the other hand...it's true that grammar is a pain. Descriptions, mainly.
It's not a problem for me to play in english (even if it was quite hard at the beginning) but translation could really help to spread the game more heavily, and, as a consequence, would bring more money to the game. It's not just a matter of money, but if another developer could be hired...
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Probably the simplest internationalisation would be a translation to... English.
The words "armour" and "colour" would be at the top of my list to implement. Most of the grammar should be perfectly acceptable to stay intact as it is, though. ;)
(It should also serve most of the less rebellious English colonies, including them lot wot stare down at you from across the Great Lakes and the whateverth parallel!)
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Probably the simplest internationalisation would be a translation to... English.
The words "armour" and "colour" would be at the top of my list to implement. Most of the grammar should be perfectly acceptable to stay intact as it is, though. ;)
(It should also serve most of the less rebellious English colonies, including them lot wot stare down at you from across the Great Lakes and the whateverth parallel!)
Ethnocentrism: Just fine, when it's not the Americans doing it.
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I'm not claiming to be at the centre[1] of the world. I'm fully 1.5 degrees west of Greenwich! And I also have a fundamental disagreement with a lot of those at the latitude of Greenwich over the meaning of the word "Dinner".
(And if I use "wot" in an unquoted manner, I'm generally not being as serious as I might be. ;) )
Mais, mon ami français (qui commencement le requete), c'est un(e?) bonne ideé. Je pense il est un peux compliqué (les autre avez les explanation mon avis), mais je souhaiter vous bonne chance. (Aussi, je regret mon langage étrenger est empirer que vous. Vous sais ca est vrai, maintenent. Meme si vous comprenez moi dans le premiere étage! Vingt ans, est plus, depuis le cours de français; plus souvent inemployé.)
((And, now, my spill-chucker hates me. All those red-underlines! The ones that are absent surprise me more, though!))
[1] Or, if you will, "center". But I won't. Why did Tim not force them to make the likes of "<centre>" and "bgcolour=#abcdef"?
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Why did Tim not force them to make the likes of "<centre>" and "bgcolour=#abcdef"?
Because he didn't speak the same dialect of English that you do?
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Why did Tim not force them to make the likes of "<centre>" and "bgcolour=#abcdef"?
Because he didn't speak the same dialect of English that you do?
Berners-Lee was born in southwest London, England, on 8 June 1955, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. One of four children, he attended Sheen Mount Primary School, and then went on to Emanuel School in London, from 1969 to 1973. He studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, where he received a first-class degree in Physics.
You're right, he's not from my area of Britain, and even without listening to him I'd expect something 'posh'/educated with a south-London base and possibly a lingering hint of Brummy in some phrasing. But still can't see any reason (and I checked the respective links, and both parents are from Birmingham[1]) why he would ever have been brought to use US variants of such contested words. My original question is still as relevant (i.e. not, but certainly no less so).
[1] Not the Alabama one...