The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

It will be very nice if the game has translations on another languages, not only English. I don't know if this will be possible in future.

I think it is possible but only speech, not the voices. Maybe due to the new remix pack ( read the thread ) they will "have" to make new voices to match up with the remix tracks, and they will do voices in other languages too. But there is a tiny chance for it to happen. After all, they all do it for 0.00$ per month, so finding someone who will do voices in English for the same amount of cash will be hard too. I am just guessing, but I am sure that this is thier position about this idea.

There are people that don't know English and can't feel the magic of the game. The text could be translated by volunteers if there are tools for import / export (i don't expect all this to happen , it's only idea). There could be problem with the fonts if the project comes to this point.

I've said it before (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Techissues;action=display;num=1044398646;start=2#2) and I'll say it again: The best thing to do at this point would be to crack out your English dictionaries and get to work on it.  If the "target" language uses a Roman alphabet, you can make a "subtitle pack", which can be dropped in to the current game and give native-language subtitles over the English speech.  As Hollywood movies did quite well with this method for many years, I think it's quite a practical approach, and the native-language speech can always be recorded later, at which time, the script will already be written.

The only downside to it is that there is ALOT of speech to translate.  But if you need to learn/use English for studies/work/etc., it might make for good practice.

Hang on, wasn't there a Japanese version of SC2 on the 3DO? Can we merge that translation into UQM? Not that I understand a word of Japanese, but I guess some people might like it (like... in Japan).

So how to build such subtitle pack , is it possible at this stage?

Absolutely.  The preferred means of doing it would be to make an add-on pack that replaces the subtitle files.  Look here (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Techissues;action=display;num=1057691207;start=4) for detailed instructions on putting an add-on together, or for a simple example, look at how my Yellow F.R.I.E.D. add-on (http://www.submedia.net/uqm/yellow-fried.zip) is put together.

Basically, all you would do is make a ZIP file that has replacement texts with the same folder/file names as the ones currently included with the game.  The hard part is making the replacement texts ;)

(I'd love to help more, but I'm American, and hence mono-lingual)

I was going to localize it into Japanese but my lack of font as well as programming knowledge stuck me a lot. (I don't have time to solve them). I realized, at least, I need a  person who can willingly help me in Japanese font as well as elaborate my translation script. Is there anyone who has those ability (at least Japanese font) and helps me patiently by any chance?

And the (subtitle) translation needs new markers for text/speech synchronization. Otherwise it might still be hard to follow the game...

I would help translatings parts of the text (like the texts of certain races (especially Supox, Utwig)) into german and/or dutch.

Greetings,
Martin

I can do German to an extent, but probably not to the extent that Krulle can, as I'm but a 4th year learner of Deutsch.



Posted by: Nic Posted on: Today at 15:28:42


*pictures people in Non-English speaking contries telling their bosses in English "You will soon die. Make whatever rituals necessary for your corporate-ladder rung."*

VUX quotes too, hehehe  ;D

Not to put a dampener on this, but I hope you folks realize how HUGE ap roject this is. There is a lot fo text to be translated if you're going to do this. I know G_M started on a German
translation a while back, but as he no longer frequents the boards, that's probably impossible to come by. And even he only got as far as translating the first conversation with the commander AFAIK.

What I'm trying to say is : I hope someone with enough energy and enthusiasm takes this up, but be warned. It's not just a few lines of text. Be prepared for hard work. And in no way expect the Dev team to put time on this, it's way outtside their sphere of work...

I admit what Lukipela said, but Paul sent me Japanese speech when the UQM project started.  Japanese speech has some problems but I don't need to localize them from the very first.  I finished translating all messages of the surface of the planets.  As for aliens, I finished ARILOU.txt, BLACKUR.txt, CHMMR.txt, COMANDR.txt and DRUUGE.txt,  but I realized one thing in the middle of localizing ILWRATH.txt -- Unless I decide Japanese font and letter, I have to do all over again because of the characteristic of Japanese language. To write Japanese, we use Kanji and two different syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana.  Both of them have 46 letters with some additional features, and Kanji letter is beyond count. Also most of Kanji characters will not be illegible on VGA resolution. So I have to choose which syllabaries I should use in the UQM before my localization work. So I was just stuck.

Btw, I think Fred is looking forward to a German version of the UQM, because I believe he does understand the language considerably. I hope you guys continue doing it.

To really do most European languages properly the fontset will need to be extended to Latin-n (where "n" is most likely 1).  Each comm directory has a "race.fon" directory with lots of PNGs with numbers in them.  Any one-byte encoding method should work without modification (so if you write "Unser Ur-Quan sind grün" with Latin-1 encoding, you'd need an umlaut-u letter as... er... (types 'man iso-8859-1'...) 252.png in the appropriate subdirectory.  (tiny.fon, in this case, as it's Zelnick's line.)

--Michael
«Attención al intruso--¡atienda a este mensaje grabado!»
(American like Nic, but grew up in the Southwest, and thus learned enough Spanish to make an idiot of himself...)

I must start to assemble a translation team :). For Bulgarian language i have to make cyrillic version of the fonts, maybe someone who is russian will be interested. By the way, 'zelnick' on bulgarian sounds funny for a name of captain of starship :).

Pleeze, translate it to german, thx. That would be cool 8)

Don't understand me wrong, I'll help, but i do not have the time to take lead in this project.

My idea to get this going is to have someone starting this project and cutting it to pieces, like one race to translate for one(or several) helper(s) who translates the complete discussion (Zelnicks and the other races parts). The teamleader should make the other changes needed (like fonts, synchronization of the subtitles, providing the original texts, sorting the incoming translated bits, ...)
I am willing to do translation of the text, no more (like i said preferably supox and/or utwig texts to german and/or dutch).

Greetings,
Martin

Well, when I saw SC2 first time the first thing I asked - is there Russian version? When my English got better I did not need it anymore.

Obviously, the translator must be very talented writer to keep all of F&P spirit in the game. There are jokes, cultural references etc.

And this job should not be done by more than two persons -- the thanslation must have style or not exist at all IMHO

For those able & willing to work on the German version, there is this project (http://sc2de.berlios.de/).

It looks like it has had little activity in a few months, but it may still be "alive", as it were.

How to change the font of the questions that the player choses. Is there .fon directory for it?

I'm in for sure!

I already translated a few games (In fact I have a translation group  ;) ).

But I'v only dealt with Roms so far, not computer games,

so the team will have to dump and reinsert the script themselves- or at least tell me how.
Also the font files.


The script is not that long- it rather short actually, compared to other games.

Hey- if any of the makers want to contact me- I'm in: or_perel@hotmail.com.

That would be my honor.  :)

I hope that the people who are already starting on a translation realise that there will be more work for them to do when we move to XML (though a lot might be done automatic).
The library I had in mind for the XML parsing is 'expat', which can handle utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1, and us-ascii encoding. So when the time for XML comes, you can just write your text in any editor that can handle one of these encodings. How we handle the charsets themselves will still need some thought. At the moment we're using .png images (1 per character), which is inadequate imho. Some standard file format which is able to handle bitmap fonts would have my personal preference.
Also, translating is far from trivial. As an exercise, try to translate the following text to your native tongue:

So very true.  Last year my friend was reading "Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen" and he commented on the fact that they simply transliterated alot of the humour in the book, which caused the jokes to make no sense (unless you happened to be bilingual and knew what they were trying to do).  I think great care would need to be takes with the UQM texts to keep a similar incident from occurring.

But I'm sure the phrase "to arms!", once translated, can have puns made at its expense in any language.  Then again, I am probably the least qualified poster on the forum to make such assertions. :)

It is just an untranslatable joke, and I believe to translate means to adapt a text to its target culture without betraying the intention of the author. We call it "localization", and I suppose "localization"  is basically different from "translation".  I think what we have to do is the former. Right?

Unfourtunally you'r 100% right,  :-/

But than again- I found a solution for this one.
Never make a direct translation: people might complain as much as they want that the original text was diffrent and stuff- but every language has it's own wonders.

You could take a diffrent joke and tell it in Hebrew or German, but in English on the other hand- it might suck really badly.


So what I suggest is that you put something that makes sense for the time being- and "pay" for it in a diffrent (and a boring) dialogue of the game.

At least that's what I did..

As Yukki said, it would need localization, not direct translation. As what to do with this quote in Finnish translation, I'd probably use the word "sotajalalle" (which has a bit same meaning as "To Arms" expect it has reference to "legs".

I am intrested ;) I translating texts into Russian now ;)
But i can`t make a Russian Fonts!
I don`t understand what i must do with PNG in the font directory to do it Russian :( Tell me please.

They're all named after integers.  You need to (a) use an 8-bit Russian encoding, and (b) name each letter after the code used to represent it.  We're using ASCII now, so, for instance, captial A is 65.png.

http://www.geocities.com/jogy_roger/SC2Translator.zip
Here it is, a tool for translating the texts. I wrote it today so it may have some bugs. I hope that it's handy.
As for the fonts i made the small cyrillic letters for the comandr.fon . I still have to draw the uppercased letters.

If you want we may share the work on cyrrilic fonts :). If you have troubles with the png files it's not necessary to save as png, i can convert the files later...

Thanks for tool Jogy ;) I began translate the texts...and waiting cyrilic png`s.

Sample of Translation
Target:Starbas

Before we go on, I have something important to tell you
Ïðåæäåæäå ÷åì ìû óéäåì, ß õî÷ó ñêàçàòü âàì ÷òî-òî î÷åíü âàæíîå


There is something I think you should know
ß äóìàþ, åñòü êîå-÷òî, ÷òî âû äîëæíû çíàòü


By the way, I thought you should know
ß ïîäóìàë âû äîëæíû çíàòü


Before we proceed, I wanted you to know
Ïðåæäå ÷åì ìû ïåðåéäåì, ÿ õî÷ó, ÷òîá âû çíàëè


I've been waiting for you to return to inform you of a new situation
ß æäàë âàøåãî âîçâðàùåíèÿ, ÷òîáû ñîîáùèòü âàì î ñëîæèâøåéñÿ ñèòóàöèè

I know you're busy, but I have some news
ß çíàþ, âû çàíÿòû, íî ó ìåíÿ åñòü äëÿ âàñ íîâîñòè




This is a little part of translated text. Jogy, i think, you can read parts of this, because Bulgarian and Russian langs have a one root.

Yes yes the alphabet is almost identical. The Russian language has some extra letters wich must be implemented.
Another thing that i forgot to tell ya, keep the number of the lines in the dialog because they are mached with the speech. If you add more the game won't show the extra lines

I know it ;)

Please post your alphabet here. I did it. And we`ll search differents.


Uper case
À Á Â Ã Ä Å ¨ Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ × Ö Ø Ù Ü Û Ú Ý Þ ß

Low case
à á â ã ä å ¸ æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ÷ ö ø ù  ü û ú ý þ ÿ

These are the extra chars - ¨ Û Ý  ¸  û  ý   (i knew it but i doubt if i'm right :)

Just a quick'n'dirty try:



Okay, it is a bit below the belt-line, but just a one-minute translation. If i would take time, i could do better, i suppose.

Like:
Alarm, alle Mann Hände an die Waffen! Halt! Wir haben ja gar keine Hände!
Argh! Meine Hände, wer hat meine Hände geklaut? Händedieb!!!
(best read to the music of "Wer hat die Kokosnuss geklaut?")

Just an idea.
Greetings,
Martin

PS: Yes it sounds a little bit artificial, but that's Umgahhumor after all...

Seemingly very litte, just enlisted to see wether there is some activity left (last one nearly 3 months ago). But that could be part of waiting for XML-based resources.
Even the board is nonfunctional by now.

Nontheless, the text could be translated already, i just need someone to put it where it belongs in the game.

Greetings,
Martin  from Aachen, Europe

Edit: I mean, we can start to translate the texts. When the XML-docs are implemented, someone needs to put the test were it belongs.

Who told that is quick and dirty ?

The first try was just out of my head, really just wrote it down as it came, no edit in it.
The second translation is better (i believe).

The hard part with that Umgah translation is the joke. In english you can understand that one two ways.

First, To Arms, means to go war, get weapons, etc. Now the word Arms also means weapons, so you "could" understand that someone is has stolen umgah's weapons from their armory or whatever. However the joke is that you can understand it also that someone has stolen the real arms which are in Umgah's body. (I'm not native english speaking, but this is how I understand the joke)

edit:

My Finnish translation would use the phrase "sotajalalle" which would literally mean "to war leg" but in Finnish it has meaning of "to step into war" or "to be offensive" etc..

Heh, i can translate it into the literature style.

Opportunities of Russian lang are unlimited... ;) It`s translates so easy!


"War and Peace"  (c) L. N. Tolstoy