Oolite Bulletins

Wolfwood wrote:

I, for one, cannot even understand the need to translate games to native languages. Perhaps I'm too old, but in my day, _all_ the games were in English. It would feel weird seeing Finnish used in Oolite...

I have the same feeling, (for Dutch/Flemish) probly also age-related. My first computers were 'talking' English, as were the keyboard-layouts. Oh, and the early Atari STs 'spoke' English, mixed w/ German error-messages. Now *that* was weird

Of course *very many* non-englishers from a certain age and on can relate to 'how natural' it is to play games in English, but in several cultures that's not the case. From a tiny-culture perspective, among young people from my land, our language is like a beached gasping fish, as USEng sneaks in from every angle. Eventually Norwegian will either be obsolete or anglified beyond recognition. Just my opinion but if there is oportunity to contribute to preserve something hereditary and worthwhile (like, for instance, how this language has influenced words used by many at sea), it should be done..

But that's from the perspective of an insignificant corner of the world. I'd think people from culturally more self-sustaining countries would feel different about this. Still, catching allusions to Python or Adams or other famous English phrases isn't second nature to many from say.. French or Spanish-speaking countries. The world domination of the English language isn't quite there yet.

Not that nurturing dying languages is Oolite's responsibility, but if it comes down to just translating 3 plists to add an alternate language to the options that's a great asset, and one that would open the Oolite experience to much younger non-englishspeaking players.

Testing and seeing the result of the Norwegian descriptions.plist (I applied quite a bit of obscure maritime terminology) was both a ridiculous and pleasing experience. I hope you'll carry on, Dajt.

It varies… I expect most Swedish players would choose to play in Swedish, but in Japan the expectation is for games to be translated (if they aren’t Japanese to begin with, of course).

Where can I get the Norwegian plist (and is it Bokmål or Nynorsk? )? I could do with some inspiration for the Swedish one.

bokmål, 2 B sure!
nynorsk would be a surreal experience in space, but I've avoided all formal education in it my whole life.

I can mail you copies of what I did.

Ahruman wrote:

It varies… I expect most Swedish players would choose to play in Swedish, but in Japan the expectation is for games to be translated (if they aren’t Japanese to begin with, of course).

Where can I get the Norwegian plist (and is it Bokmål or Nynorsk? ;-))? I could do with some inspiration for the Swedish one.

They're checked in on the i18n branch. I may not have checked in the most recent batch sent yet though.

I volunteer for a Dutch version, too.

Even if I probably won't use it myself, though

So... Is this translation thing for real? I mean, do you think it will evolve into a fully mature 'localisation' project?

Because I could imagine translating the planet-descriptions won't be straightforward...

Well, you can download an installer for the PC, and it should build for linux if you know what you're doing.

I've not looked at the code to generate planet and inhabitant descriptions, and I don't know anything about languages other than English so I don't know what is required.

I've spent a couple of weeks on this, and it doesn't actually add anything to the gameplay so I don't want to waste my time on it if only about 3 people want it.

It will be a big job to get everything sorted, for example the HUD code can draw text anywhere and any size - I can't see a way to do that with any of the TTF font libs, so I'll have to put a fair amount of work into it if I want to make the HUDs backwards compatible, and not just have a single HUD font.

If you want to do Dutch, just translate whatever you feel like in descriptions.plist, equipment.plist, and commodities.plist. You can get the files by browsing the SVN rep (branches/i18n) on ooline-linux, or e-mail me at the address at the top of the thread and I'll send them to you.

dajt wrote:

Well, you can download an installer for the PC, and it should build for linux if you know what you're doing.

I don't know what I'm doing

I run linux on my iBook, but that has a broken screen, and OSX on my old tower...

I could do some plists translations of course... See how that flies...

I guess I'll sit back and wait a bit, to see if this idea has enough interest (how about a poll?) before wasting my -and esp. your- time...

Note to all those translators out there – that’s right, all 27 of you: I’ve changed the implementation of species name generation to explicitly differentiate between singular and plural names. Description.plist:inhabitants now has a fifth array, which contains plural versions of the strings in the fourth array. Quite a few changes of this nature will probably be needed. “Human Colonial” is still hard-coded.

This doesn’t affect the generated text in English.

ArkanoiD has come through with a start on the Russian translation! See a screenshot of the status page.

If anyone wants to help with Russian, let me know and I'll send you the files.

As for plurals, I have also been doing that while extracting the hard-coded strings to descriptions.plist. Where a singular or plural may appear I've split it into two entries.

I'd love to see Oolite in one of the Asian languages, so if anyone where can read/write a language from India/SE Asia, please have a go at a few of the strings so we can see what it looks like!

The Russian version is obviously going to look very different, which is cool.

Don't use this. Any japanese person reading it will probably scratch his head for hours before giving up. :^j But it will give you an idea of how it may look.

I used the same screenshot as Ahruman and Murgh.

Question: how do I get the non-English language files to be used? I'm sure it's very obvious, so I apologise in advance. I tried replacing the default .plist file with the one I wanted to try out and creating a .oxp\Config directory and putting the .plist file there, but still nothing

First of all, sorry I haven't tried your translations yet Draco. Been a bit indisposed.

I just replace the descriptions.plist, equipment.plist, and commodities.plist files in oolite.app/Contents/Resources/Config. The files must have these names, and not something like equipment-russian.plist or equipment.plist.russian.

Of course you must also be using a version installed from the unicode-enabled windows installer to make this work, or be a *NIX wizard to get FTGL and it's wrapper compiled and going.

No need to apologise, Dajt. And I'm sorry to hear that you've been unwell: here's hopes for a hyperspeedy recovery

... aha! I know what the problem is. I was using the 'cached' version of the commodities list. I just reloaded, witchspaced and checked the list: it came up with "?????"

Does that count as a bug, Aegidian? I'd've thought it would be better if the text changed as soon as the patch is installed, rather than having to jump to activate it.

Right, off to get the unicode version...

Right, well, the report is that the Cyrillic text looks pretty good, actually There are a few problems here and there with the translations crashing over the other text, particularly on the Status page. The title line also tends to come over the beauty line just below it.

Am I right in thinking that this is a fairly old build? If so, is there any hope of getting a newer one built with Unicode support in it? Please please pretty please!