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

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Graf Zahl
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Graf Zahl »

Me, too, but the 'Hanger' is what TNT used, so in English it will remain. But for other languages that does not work, even if a hangar is called hangar in the language.
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Post by Enjay »

I wonder if "Hanger" was a deliberate mis-spelling to the wrong kind of hanger/hangar or if it was just a mistake?
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Post by Graf Zahl »

I've seen this mistake being made so often that I cannot imagine that it was deliberate. Just like an astonishingly large amount of people who write "it's" instead of "its". But whatever, even if it's meant to be a pun, it doesn't translate. Just like it's virtually impossible to localize Plutonia's "Caughtyard".
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Gez »

Depends, that's the one I got "pris de court" for.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Teddipetzi »

Are there any plans to add more characters to the fonts?
While they currently have all characters needed for the supported languags there may still be cases where mapper may use some local designations from the remaining languages that are in use across Europe. For the Nordic languages all otherwise unused characters have been added, but for unsupported Eastern European languages this has not been done.
Also, there is one language in Europe which doesn't have all characters in the support sheet - I am speaking about Welsh. Welsh can use all 3 major accents on both w and y, but 3 of these letters are in the Latin_Extended_Additional block, not in Latin_Extended_A like all the rest. Shouldn't these 3 letters at least be added to the support sheet? If I am not mistaken these are the only characters being used by any European language that do not appear in that sheet.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Graf Zahl »

Gez wrote:Depends, that's the one I got "pris de court" for.

... and that's the only good thing I ever got for that map in any language. Thanks for reminding me, I always wanted to change this in the translation. But translating puns and wordplays like that is notoriously hard, you have to be very lucky if your language allows to do something equally clever.
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Graf Zahl
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Post by Graf Zahl »

Teddipetzi wrote:Are there any plans to add more characters to the fonts?
Not really, I have done enough work on this to get what we have. Maybe later when the days get shorter and the weather gets colder so I spend more time indoors.
Teddipetzi wrote: While they currently have all characters needed for the supported languags there may still be cases where mapper may use some local designations from the remaining languages that are in use across Europe. For the Nordic languages all otherwise unused characters have been added, but for unsupported Eastern European languages this has not been done.
This sounds like the only use case, unless someone comes forward and works on a translation for these languages.
Teddipetzi wrote: Also, there is one language in Europe which doesn't have all characters in the support sheet - I am speaking about Welsh. Welsh can use all 3 major accents on both w and y, but 3 of these letters are in the Latin_Extended_Additional block, not in Latin_Extended_A like all the rest. Shouldn't these 3 letters at least be added to the support sheet? If I am not mistaken these are the only characters being used by any European language that do not appear in that sheet.
Good point. -i have to admit that for me this language ranks on the same level as Maltese, i.e. its speakers are almost certainly capable of speaking English, but the spreadsheet should contain all characters that are in use in Europe, so I'll add these 3.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Tapwave »

Gez wrote:Depends, that's the one I got "pris de court" for.
Hah, I feel bad for translating it another way, 'Cour-oincé', which admittedly is a bit closer to the original meaning but also vastly less elegant :P
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Triple_sSs »

For the Esperanto translation, it looks like we've gotten a good chunk of the engine text done so far, and we also have intermission texts done for Doom 1, 2, and CQ3. Probably going to start on Final Doom and the Heretic games next.
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Post by Kappes Buur »

Mention of Esperanto always reminds of this old joke:

Interviewer: Do you actually speak Esperanto?
Nouveau Riche: Of course, we visit the country every year.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Teddipetzi »

I just sent the last piece of the Dutch translation.
There's one think I'd like to say about this: The Strife dialogue was a bit much to handle, so to save time I took the entire bunch of text, ran it through a machine translation and then fixed the output line by line. Fortunately English to Dutch translates quite well so most of what came out was fine, but it was wildly inconsistent with translating some specific terms. I hope I got all discrepancies fixed but with that amount of text I cannot make any guarantees. It's easy to accidentally skip a line.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Graf Zahl »

I added all your text to the main spreadsheet - and I indeed found a few places with inconsistent naming, which I fixed.

Regarding the quality of the translation, let's not forget that this wasn't done by professionals - it cannot be expected to have such good quality. I can read Dutch a bit - living ca. 80km from the Dutch border I visit the country quite frequently - and most of the text looks fine - I cannot vouch for the grammar, though, for me as a German it occasionally looks weird. ;)

I'm quite sure if we could afford to let some professional translators read the content they'll have a field day pointing out errors in all languages. On the other hand, I have seen even professionals produce garbage - sometimes knowing the context is far more important than knowing how to translate.

Regarding machine translations, I used the same method for the intermission texts, especially Heretic's and Hexen's which are awful even in English. As long as you review the machine output for correctness there's nothing wrong with such an approach.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Graf Zahl »

So with that done, here's a quick list of relevant European languages not yet supported. Relevant meaning that Wikipedia lists more than 100000 native speakers:

Northern Europe:
Norwegian
Swedish
Danish
Icelandic

Central and Western Europe:
In terms of national languages, support is complete, but a few remarks about special cases:
- I cannot say if the Belgian variants of Dutch and French may warrant separate treatment.
- Spain has several regional languages like Catalan. Most of its speakers should be covered by Spanish, though.
- Welsh is also a language with a surprisingly large amount of speakers (around 700000), but I think that most of these also speak English. (Irish and Scottish on the other hand are mostly irrelevant.)


Southern Europe:
Greek (ca. 5% complete)

Eastern Europe:
Estonian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Croatian
Hungarian (ca. 40% complete)
Bulgarian
Romanian (ca. 10% complete)
Turkish
Ukrainian
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Post by Marisa the Magician »

Graf Zahl wrote:- Spain has several regional languages like Catalan. Most of its speakers should be covered by Spanish, though.
Oh you'd be surprised. There are people out there who refuse to speak anything but their regional languages. This is especially true in Catalonia.
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Re: Translating GZDoom's text content. Read if you want to h

Post by Kostov »

I can translate to Swedish if it's desired.
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