Translation to other languages?

Message

Getix · #1 Post by **Getix** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 11:35 am

Will FO Project be translated in other languages or it will be only in english?

noelte · #2 Post by **noelte** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 11:59 am

german is already in. I guess every not to exotic (chinese, japanese) language could be supported.

Bastian-Bux · #3 Post by **Bastian-Bux** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 12:48 pm

It all depends on translators. German as noelte said is already guaranteed. The same should be true for swedish (if they even bother).

For the romanic languages we just have to find people that are able to translate from english properly.

pd · #4 Post by pd » Wed Jan 05, 2005 3:43 pm

I guess every not to exotic (chinese, japanese) language could be supported.

just curious, what is the problem with those languages? the characters are just a different font... at last we would only need a chinese and/or japanese forum member, who is willing to translate the stringtables.

admittedly, it would need much more effort to translate the entire encyclopedia or story(campaign) stuff, once we have something like this.

noelte · #5 Post by **noelte** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 4:18 pm

pd wrote: just curious, what is the problem with those languages? the characters are just a different font... at last we would only need a chinese and/or japanese forum member, who is willing to translate the stringtables.

hmm, you are right, i was thinking about the letters. But is there a font which can handle the >5000 symbols of chinese? BTW, i think we are still using ansi, maybe we have to switch to unicode?!

BTW: what's about planet rotation?

Bastian-Bux · #6 Post by **Bastian-Bux** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 5:36 pm

Well, the mayor problem of those exotic languages is font size.

The "european languages" shouldn't be to problematic. German is one of the languages that uses most space for simple sentences. So if the text boxes are big enough for german, then any european language should fit.

But sign languages might use more space, especially as they tend to need a higher font size to be readable. On the other hand one sign can include a full part of the sentence in the same way a german word can wrap a whole english description.

So it depends on the skills of the people that do the localization.

Moriarty · #7 Post by **Moriarty** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 5:50 pm

Incidentally, what lanaguage is it going to be in anyway (the default release)?

English or American? Yes a serious question!

#8 Post by **Geoff the Medio** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 5:53 pm

Moriarty wrote:English or American? Yes a serious question!

I asked Tyreth roughly the same question...

Tyreth wrote:Hi,

There's no official statement on which is official. I myself am Australian, so feel more comfortable with British English. Localisation as you say is possible, once we close towards 1.0 we can specify which.

Strings are kept in separate files for languages, so the only other location is in the actual code - which is not an issue.

Getix · #9 Post by **Getix** » Wed Jan 05, 2005 7:06 pm

Bastian-Bux wrote:It all depends on translators. German as noelte said is already guaranteed. The same should be true for swedish (if they even bother).

For the romanic languages we just have to find people that are able to translate from english properly.

Well, here I am

Sandlapper · #10 Post by **Sandlapper** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 12:37 am

LOL, bear in mind "American" english is regional - Southern or Yankee, east coast-west coast. Also don't forget "Native" Americans - Eastern Sioux- Western Sioux- Iroqois - Utes - Mississipi valley mound builders- Etc. And don't forget the Hawaii and Eskimo native langauges!

Bastian-Bux · #11 Post by **Bastian-Bux** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 9:06 am

@Sandlapper: or to put it bluntly: american english is nothing more then a collection of bastardisized english dialects ^^.

Whats next? Translation into Saxonian (Saxonia, a state of germany. Also the name of a small thievish mountain tribe, which says about themselve: "we can everything, except proper german". One part of that sentence is true, the other is the opposite).

drek · #12 Post by **drek** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 2:30 pm

LOL, bear in mind "American" english is regional - Southern or Yankee, east coast-west coast.

But written words are spelled the same, regardless of regional accents. afiak, American english was actually standardized before English english.

Serious question:

When writing up stringtable stuffs for techs, etc, should we be using english or american spellings?

Thought: We could have a perl script (or the like) go through and swap out spellings if it's terribly important to have a different stringtable for English 1.0 and (the superior American

) English 2.0.

Bastian-Bux · #13 Post by **Bastian-Bux** » Thu Jan 06, 2005 3:39 pm

Make BE is standard, cause most people still learn civilized english. Afaik only those countries that can't pay proper teacher hire american college kids to teach AE.

PS: for all that feel insulted by the above: just stop reading it. Believe me, we got much more dialects in Germany then you can muster in the whole Commonwealth AND the USA together. So excuse me for adapting a famous german sport (making silly jokes about people speaking dialects) to a global scale ^^.

Blade Runner · #14 Post by **Blade Runner** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 8:05 pm

Bastian-Bux wrote: The "european languages" shouldn't be to problematic. German is one of the languages that uses most space for simple sentences. So if the text boxes are big enough for german, then any european language should fit.

I have to disagree a bit. German sentences are quite long, but Hungarian sntences are usually longer.

I am a native Hungarian, so I can do the translation. If the Hungarian text will fit, I think the rest of the European languages will fit (included German).
Just a few example:
csillag rendszer = star system
csillag = star
idegen lények = aliens
etc.

(There are a few short words obviously, like:
bolygó = planet
gép = machine
hajó = ship)

Aquitaine · #15 Post by **Aquitaine** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 2:28 am

Sandlapper wrote:LOL, bear in mind "American" english is regional - Southern or Yankee, east coast-west coast. Also don't forget "Native" Americans - Eastern Sioux- Western Sioux- Iroqois - Utes - Mississipi valley mound builders- Etc. And don't forget the Hawaii and Eskimo native langauges!

As Drek pointed out, American written english is not regional (at least, it is not supposed to be).

I suspect that the simplest choice here is to take the practical route and use the flavor of English employed by the majority of the content creators. I can write UK-style if necessary, but to the best of my knowledge, most of the design team uses American English. I don't really care though.