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Author Topic: Dwarf Fortress localization patch  (Read 116588 times)

Moradin

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Re: Dwarf Fortress localization patch
« Reply #255 on: December 26, 2024, 09:49:52 am »

Hi, I rarely visit the forum. You can ask questions about the localization here: https://github.com/orgs/dfint/discussions

As for untranslated text, there are some places, where the current method of translation fails.
In case of the screenshot attached in Crongdyne's post, the translation library intercepts text several times, and the first time it does it in this case is after the text is split into words (to make word wrap in the window), and translates the text word-by-word. And then it intercepts already partially translated text split into separate lines, and it can't find these lines in the dictionary. The way to fix it is to intercept the text before it split into words, but there are other technical difficulties.

Thanks for the reply insolor, late as it were. I'm not sure I've understood how the whole translation library thing works, but if I got the gist of it, the whole thing is extremely poorly designed. It feels like a method conceived by a native english-speaker who's totally clueless as to how other languages operate. Hooks and intercepts just won't get the job done when it comes to languages as complex as e.g. the Italian, where even adjectives have gender and number, there's more definite articles (the English only uses "the" whereas the Italian uses 6 different ones), wholly different constructs and so on. The only translation is feasible by presenting whole sentences from the English/original version, and let the translator fill in the corresponding translated version in their own language. I worked as an official translator to a few games somewhere like 20 years ago, and trust me when I say that is the only way an acceptable result can be achieved... anything else is just a waste of time.
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insolor

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Re: Dwarf Fortress localization patch
« Reply #256 on: December 26, 2024, 12:05:14 pm »

the whole thing is extremely poorly designed

There is no design, there are only hacks. The game just doesn't have any way of a normal localization. We're just trying to make workarounds. That is, we can just replace parts of text from the game with other parts of text ("translations"). Currently, we cannot change the way how the game combines the text afterward. Some things just don't work at all. We can just work with what we have.
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