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

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, and yes. But you really shouldn't be editing CSV files directly - this is only to load CSV exports from Google Sheets for our internal translations.

[mrPron]

I see, thank you.
Actually, I want to make my translation available not only for new versions of GZDoom, but also for old versions of GZDoom and Zandronum. But it seems that GZDoom 4.10 completely ignores the csv file if there is already an old LANGUAGE lump in the archive. Would you please raise the priority for the csv-files to avoid the necessity to create an additional patch with translation?

[Graf Zahl]

There is no priority here- things will be read in directory order. If you have two LANGUAGE lumps in the same container file you have to ensure the intended ordering - in Zips you have to use another extension that sorts in later alphabetically.

[mrPron]

There is no priority here- things will be read in directory order. If you have two LANGUAGE lumps in the same container file you have to ensure the intended ordering - in Zips you have to use another extension that sorts in later alphabetically.

Damn... SLADE confused me with its "Move Up", "Move Down", and I completely forgot that pk3 is not wad at all.
Yes, changing the extension from .csv to .zzz solved the problem. Thanks.

[Graf Zahl]

I could use some help completing Raze's fonts. The Russian translation has made significant progress recently but right now the only font that has complete support is Blood's menu font.
Are there any volunteers who want to work on the others? If I had to do it all by myself it would take a few weeks.

Here's the completion sheet for these fonts:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

What we need is the characters marked red.

I am definitely going to need help here. Extending the Duke 1.5 font for Cyrillic and Greek is beyond my capabilities. We can make do with the 1.3 font for now so it's not super urgent. The other fonts are all a lot easier because they do not have any fake 3D lighting applied.

[Graf Zahl]

I'm not really sure if this is in any way useful - it's just the fallout of a project I have been working on.
I was tasked with writing a tool feeding the contents of large Excel sheets to deepl's REST API. Since I wasn't given enough testing material I just used the ZDoom texts for testing and collected the output in here.
Here's the result of all this, mostly unreviewed. This covers all European languages deepl supports for which we do not already have a translation - Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Turkish. For Greek, Ukrainian and Bulgarian there are some unfinished translations which I merged in (marked cyan)

I am well aware that in this form this is of no good use, but maybe it's of help if someone has an interest doing these language, so I'm leaving these texts here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[Graf Zahl]

Here's a status update:

All Raze fonts except Duke 1.5 are complete now and I'll add them to the project later today.
I also made a few more additions to the GZDoom fonts - this includes three characters I missed in the large round, plus 6 more to really cover all European languages - mainly to allow displaying proper names of these languages, not so much for translating to them.

Aside from that I decided to do some thorough cleanup of the menu texts - there's quite a bit of redundancy that should be eliminated and all the text at the bottom needs to be moved to their proper place. To allow this I had to fill in the remaining gaps in those text sheets - it's some 40 texts for Korean and Serbian that were missing - I did machine translations for them and color coded them accordingly so that they later can be found and reviewed again.

I am also adding an "Unused" tab to the sheet so we can move content that is not used anymore to a safe place without polluting the game translation with it. I would like to keep it in case some of it can be reused later.

Due to the edits I am going to make I would like to ask any contributors to avoid doing larger edits to the "Common" and "GZDoom engine strings" tabs until I announce completion of this work

Last but not least, I had an incomplete Ukrainian translation sitting around which was done in a separate sheet but stopped in early December. I decided to add it to the sheet so that interested persons can add to it (also by reviewing the content of the machine translated content from the post above to save work.)

[Graf Zahl]

I am definitely going to need help here. Extending the Duke 1.5 font for Cyrillic and Greek is beyond my capabilities. We can make do with the 1.3 font for now so it's not super urgent. The other fonts are all a lot easier because they do not have any fake 3D lighting applied.

Update: I now have all the missing characters for Duke's 1.5 font. All the other Raze fonts are complete as well and will be converted over the next few days.

[ZzZombo]

Could the remarks column also be pinned?

[Graf Zahl]

Sure, but on the GZDoom engine strings there is a problem with merged cells and I haven't found the one responsible yet.

[Xeotroid]

Line 1143, heading titled Player, is the culprit.

[Professor Hastig]

I got a question about how to handle obituaries for languages where the grammar rules are too complex and substitution does not work, even if the sentences are simplified. Should it just revert to English then or are there better solutions? I got curious after discussing this subject with some Eastern European colleagues who showed interest in reviewing the provided machine translations. But some pointed out that the obituaries cannot be bent to their language rules because it's not just gender but also for example the final letters in a word or the (non-available) killer's gender for multiplayer that determine what needs to be done.

In general I think that the chances of getting translations done would be a lot better if the obituaries could just be skipped entirely and leave them empty. Of all the texts in there they are by far the least important but also the hardest ones to translate.

[Graf Zahl]

The rules should be as follows:

1. try to rephrase the line so that it isn't affected by grammar rules anymore. Don't try to slavishly retain the literal translation. If something else that fits the means of death being described works, that's just fine-
2. simplify the line if possible
3. if nothing else works, write %o was killed (by %k). (Leave out the 'by %k' part if it contains gender/letter dependent parts.)
4. if even that won't work it can be assumed that obituaries in this language cannot be done with a current system. If this happens leave *ALL* obituary lines empty.

[Professor Hastig]

Thanks. That will help, although it may result in awful texts. I've been checking the Turkish translation with a Turkish colleague and we found out that there is no good way to do the obituaries right. Ironically Turkish has virtually zero gender aware language but conjugations of names can be hideous, they mostly depend on the last letter of the name, so it'd need a completely different rule set of what's there right now.

Something like "%o was killed by %k's weapon" is impossible to do, for example, the only construction that seems to work is some boring "%o was [funny verb] by [something that's not a player name]". As soon as the sentence structure becomes more variable the conjugations will strike again.

So far we managed, but the result is mediocre at best, but I guess it's still better than not translating them at all.

[Xeotroid]

Yeah, in Czech, the obituaries are in the form, "%o was [gender-dependant funny verb] with the [weapon] of the player %k," as specifying the noun "player" both puts the killer's name back into nominative (so no changes), and the masculine form of the noun can be used universally (although it's not ideal). I'm thinking a more modern variant of just using "%k -> (weapon name) -> %o" would be better at this point.