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

[Graf Zahl]

All done. There's now only one spreadsheet for everything - anyone who had access to GZDoom Game Strings will be able to edit it. The others have been set to read only and will be kept around in case something went missing in the new one

[toyoda2610]

Graf and company:

I know this may sound like an odd question, but will you guys add support for East Asian languages? (Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, etc)

Glad!

[Graf Zahl]

GZDoom already has a Japanese and Korean translation.
But nobody has come forward yet to make a Chinese one yet, so there you go. If someone is willing to translate the content into these languages, they surely will get used.

For Raze the situation is a bit more complex because we not only need to extend the fonts for other Latin and Cyrillic languages, but also got to deal with a somewhat more extensive setup - we got 4 different menus and several intermission screens that need to be extended to use the generic font for East Asian. But again, as long as there's no translations to use it is a moot point.

[Marisa the Magician]

Good lord localizing all the Raze stuff is going to be hell... I gave it a try for a while but I think I'll wait until I've got more time.

[sinisterseed]

How so?

It can't be worse than Heretic or Hexen.

[Rachael]

Because 5 games? That would be my first guess.

[sinisterseed]

Perhaps, but these games don't have as much text as the Doom engine titles do, especially Strife - speaking of which, I'm still procrastinating there because there's so much dialogue wtf. I think I'm halfway through, but motivation hasn't been with me lately.

I'm quite likely going to get the Build games done before Strife lol. Duke is already done, minus the multiplayer taunts.

[Graf Zahl]

Aside from the menu it's roughly 1500 lines of text, that's less than half of what GZDoom has. And the only one with a few somewhat longer story texts is Exhumed. The vast majority of the texts are short. I went through most of the German content in 2-3 days. This compares in no way with the huge amount of game text in GZDoom. It actually took me longer to translate all the intermission texts for Doom, Heretic and Hexen than all of Raze.
I haven't bothered with the Duke graphics that have text embedded, though. Maybe later.

[sinisterseed]

Same, to say nothing of GZDoom's engine strings.

Goodness grief that's a lot.

[wildweasel]

Where I suspect most of the headache will be, is Redneck Rampage, because getting that authentically "stereotypical, undereducated country folk" feel in a language that isn't English would be a heck of a thing to pull off, because "Redneck" is as much a cultural thing as it is a linguistic thing.

Oh, and they changed all the menu strings to fit their mood, too - which leads me to wonder if any of that needs changing on GZDoom's side, too. (It'd certainly be amusing, but absolutely at the cost of being able to understand any of it!)

[Rachael]

It's just a matter of finding a particular language/culture's equivalent. If you don't want to look outside of English, you can even find some really good examples of it in both the UK and Australia without looking too far - and they share a lot of similarities with their American counterparts.

That being said, every language and every country has it. Isolated farmland communities where the focus is more on work and survival than it is on enlightenment and education. There's rednecks everywhere in the world, they just aren't called that.

[Graf Zahl]

Wit RR you have to be careful. I chose to steer clear of transforming important content into deliberately stupid soundin German - for me the fun ends when it comes to presenting a menu to the user. What I kept were the slight insults in some of the messages.

What I found more problematic was SW's fortune cookie texts with their suggestive content. In many cases I just chose to replace them entirely with something entirely different that conveys the same sentiment because the puns just would not work anymore when being translated.

[sinisterseed]

Yeah, RR is gonna be incredibly stupid, so I'll get this out of the way right now - I will not struggle too much to keep its essence intact, I simply do not think such a thing is even possible in my tongue - finding some equivalents, maybe, but that's the extent it can probably go -, so it'll be localized, but its stupidity will most likely be lost in the process. If someone else manages to come up with more fitting translations they're welcome to edit them afterwards (or before I even get to them, whatever floats their boat).

SW's fortune cookies are actually easy for me. I can simply use plain broken grammar for most of them and it would be just the same. My only concern is that some of them may end up too long, and that's something that's not easily worked around.

[Gez]

Good broken grammar omits words for shortness.

[sinisterseed]

Easier said than done.