Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to help

[Graf Zahl]

Sure, but you'll have to wait until this evening.

[Graf Zahl]

Shall I export the entire files or just the translated content?

[Kostov]

Just the translated content, please.

[Kostov]

Thanks for the addition! I’ve filled up the strings from the second language file myself. Maybe someone who speaks better Serbian than I do will continue working on it in the future.

[Master O]

Surprisingly, that spreadsheet doesn't have any Spanish translations...

[Kostov]

Surprisingly, that spreadsheet doesn't have any Spanish translations...

A couple of people have worked on Spanish translations. There’s this one, and TDRR also wanted to make one (possibly based on the one on Pastebin that I just linked).

[Graf Zahl]

The spreadsheet only has the contents that were already part of the engine. None of the Spanish translations were made official. The one being linked here still has some gender problems, unfortunartely none of this was ever coordinated. One thing that probably needs to be done is to define gender replacements in the string table itself in a way that allows better customization, the current system is limited to the obituaries and unfortunately also hard coded to English which makes it relatively useless.

But most importantly, without volunteers which understand the language and help define the rules in a way that can be implemented generically, it is hard to support other languages.

[Kostov]

Graf, what’s your stance on adding translations into constructed languages? I had one made for Interslavic a while ago, in both Latin and Cyrillic. It’s far from complete, but I would like to develop it further someday.

Here’s a topic on the Interslavic forum that I posted as a demonstration.

[Graf Zahl]

It depends on the usefulness. Are these languages actually used somewhere or is this just more of scientific interest?

[Kostov]

It’s really not that widespread. Adding it into GZDoom might help bring it more attention.

[Graf Zahl]

Sorry, but that's hardly enough justification for continued maintenance.
I don't think that an engine which has roughly 10000 downloads per month worldwide is going to help with such a thing. Most people using Doom use English anyway because translated mods do not exist.

[Gez]

The main interest of Interslavic is supposedly that it's easy to understand for anyone who speaks a Slavic language even if they haven't studied Interslavic itself. So, for example, a Bulgarian user should find it easier to read Interslavic than Russian if there's no Bulgarian localization in the first place.

[Graf Zahl]

True, but it's still another language to support, and one unlikely to get much interest from contributors.
If push came to shove, I could still make somewhat proper French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch texts from Google translate output for simple stuff, but my knowledge of Slavic languages is non-existent.
Anyway, right now it doesn't look like this sparked much interst. Aside from Undead we got two other contributors, one for German and one for French. And the German translation will be complete by the end of this week, so my guess is that the entire effort will stop after I managed to integrate the Spanish text linked above, but that needs a better substitution logic for gender specific texts, so there's no time table.

I wonder if asking on Doomworld may get us more help - but when the creator of RemooD asked the same thing a few years back, the entire thing went nowhere.

[Kostov]

Two people are working on the French translation, in fact. There was a person who wanted to translate Strife: Veteran Edition into French. I got in touch with him, and he’s currently working together with Tapwave. They started on the Strife dialogues not long ago.

Besides that, I’m part of a server full of Russian-speaking Doomers, many of which also use GZDoom. Not only are they helping me revise the Russian Strife translation, which is currently in another spreadsheet until it’s ready to make it into GZDoom, but also a voiceover. theleo_ua, who is part of the server and has posted in the localization topic numerous times, has had an active interest in the translation.

[Graf Zahl]

Good to know. Do you have any idea when this may be ready? I'd really like to do a release once French and Russian are done.