The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Me and a friend of mine want to translate UQM in french. Do you know if there is already a french version. If there is not, do you is a good idea to translate the game in french ?

AFAIK there isn't. There was a guy working on a german veriosn a while back, but he dropped off, so that never got finished. Are you thinking translate the text only, or do new voices as well?

It can be a bit tricky to translate it correctly, there's a lot of fairly weird words and jokes in there, but hey, go for it!

We started working on it. With Valium, we are two on this project and i think we can deal with it. Anyway if we have a problem, we know where to ask :)


We've got a question: do you know if there is an easy way to put letters with accents? You know in french you have some weird letters like these é, à, û and so on :)

well, on the dutch layout of the keyboard, you cah make them with keycombinations such as (shift + 6) + e makes ê (first press shift+6, then press "e").

American keyboard layouts dont allow that, i think pressinf shift+alt changes that, or goto the control panel and change it to french/dutch.

more keycombinations:
(shift + ') + e  --> ë
' + e --> é
` + e --> è

also, try to combine ctrl + alt + shift and a letter for some special letters..

I think Meep-Eep had a good point when he said that translation of these texts would be highly non-trivial.  They are quite vernacular, and contain alot of jokes that likely wouldn't translate well.  For instance, try to translate the following phrase from the game, while preserving its tone and humour:



You gentlemen(?) do have your work cut out for you, I hope you stick with it.  More to the point, I hope you write down for posterity all of the "rough spots" you had with the dialogues, so that people wishing to translate into yet more languages can plan their activities accordingly.


The bad news:  you will need to make them yourself.  All of them.  And there are 31 fonts used in the game (search your content folder for directories ending on ".fon")
The good news:  With French, it should be relatively easy to do.  For instance, to add a grave accent to the letter e, open the image for the letter "e" (65.png) in a paint program, draw a grave accent on it, then save it as 232.png; 232 is the ISO-8859-1 character code for "è"  Repeat for all symbols that you require.

Depending on how well the game pays attention so such character encodings, you should be able to write your translation texts "naturally", and just provide the game with any symbols it may be missing as part of your "language pack".

I hope this helps, and was not too discouraging :)

Hi,

Myself and a German friend of mine have been working on a German translation for a couple of months (I am doing the grunt work, and he is proofreading my stuff, as I am not a native German speaker).

We have translated most of the 3DO menus (because they are content, and the PC menus are in the code). However, the big job is the dialogue.  We have got as far as the first appearance of the Ilwrath (so we have translated the Ur-Quan drone's initial warning, all the getting-to-know-you dialogue with the commander and the moonbase mission.)

I was trying to avoid the necessity of having a different set of binaries (i.e. I wanted to only distribute "content"). Unfortunately, it looks like we'll have to have German-language binaries because there are a few critical bits where the English text is in the code (like the words "captain" and "fuel" that appear above and below the picture of the flagship at the side of the screen).

As for translating jokes, I read an article once about the people who translate "Asterix" from French into English. In that article, they said that they try to put in a substitute joke if the original joke cannot be translated.

Another thing that is a challenge to translate is the technical terms (like Emergency Warp Escape Unit, etc.), especially into German, which can be a little bit long-winded with that sort of thing.

We should stay in touch - we will probably encounter similar problems.  I was actually thinking of making a "How to translate UQM" web page at some stage....

Cheers,
Brian P.

....Oh yeah, I forgot to say that IMHO, it is a *very* good idea to translate UQM into French, because it allows more people to play this brilliant game!

Hmmm.....I just found that old "Translation" thread and followed the link to the site for the German translation project.

The last post on that site was in November and they were apparently half way through already, so it looks like I am duplicating their work. I'm going to try to contact them and find out if they're still working on it.

The problems with translations at this time, as that we have yet to switch to XML. Things are going slowly now, but this will still be done at some point. Also ALL strings will be in content, including the ones now hardcoded in the executable (except strings such as "Can't find the content.").
To insert accents there, you'd either write the XML file in UTF8 or UTF16, or use the special sequences such as "ë'.
It will also be the possibility to refer to different files in the content, thereby allowing different images - some images contain text - and different voice files.
If you're going to do a translation now, some things will have to be redone later, though a lot can be handled automatically.

Thanks for the heads-up Meep-eep.

I have been in contact with the guy running the German translation project and it's still going.  They are about 60% done.  I'm goiing to "enlist"   :).