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

[Graf Zahl]

And I think it's here where most translations fail. They go for the literal translation too often even rephrasing would make things easier. Had I translated the obituaries literally to German, we would have had the same problem, but rewording those with problem parts was possible without compromising the text.

[Graf Zahl]

Except for a few unclear technical terms the German translation is complete.

[Kinsie]

Keep in mind there are at least two versions of Spanish that will be needed, similar to English (which, really, should have a third version for the Australian continent).

Not really. For pretty much everything GZDoom demands, Australian and New Zealand English can just be copy-pasted or aliased over from British English. And even then, American spellings and such are easily understood after decades of pop culture exposure. Creating separate language definitions for AU/NZ English would just increase the maintenance overhead without getting much in the way of results in return.

[Rachael]

Fair enough. Didn't know AU/NZ English was that close to UK - I knew it was a lot closer than American English, though.

[wildweasel]

Keep in mind there are at least two versions of Spanish that will be needed, similar to English (which, really, should have a third version for the Australian continent).

Not really. For pretty much everything GZDoom demands, Australian and New Zealand English can just be copy-pasted or aliased over from British English. And even then, American spellings and such are easily understood after decades of pop culture exposure. Creating separate language definitions for AU/NZ English would just increase the maintenance overhead without getting much in the way of results in return.

Not to mention, with the way the language system already works, 95% of the strings in use are already handled by [en default], and only the strings that need changing need to be included in the other dialects.

[Firebrand]

Yesterday I gave a quick reading of the spanish translation you guys posted, I found some small orthographic and style errors, I could correct those for you before you include the translation officially, but it will have to wait until the weekend, if you are OK with that .

Which would be the best way to send the changes to you?

[Graf Zahl]

If you have a Google account I can give you edit access. Otherwise download as a spreadsheet and post the edited version here, but please mark the fields you changed. Also please be aware that I need to reformat the intermission screen texts because the lines are far too long.

If you are interested you may also fill in some of the gaps.

[Firebrand]

I have a google account, I'll send it through a PM to you ASAP, I didn't know there were gaps, I'll have to see what they are, maybe I can help you with those as well if there aren't too many .

I'm trying to write in a "neutral" Spanish, I know that Spanish of Spain has different conjugation of some verbs and some words are different from Latin Spanish (which is the one I speak), but I'll try to leave it as neutral as possible, so it can be understood by as many Spanish speaking people.

[Graf Zahl]

Done. The gaps are those marked red, plus all the Hexen script and Strife dialogue stuff. That all may be a bit much, though, these were recent exports and make up roughly half of the entire text data. Currently the only complete languages are English and German.

[Enjay]

Also please be aware that I need to reformat the intermission screen texts because the lines are far too long.

What is the maximum character limit for a line of intermission text before it falls off the edge of the screen? (or at least a "safe" value given that the endtexts do not use a uni-spaced font.)

[Graf Zahl]

That depends on the characters and the font you use. What I already did is center the text if I see it's too long, so that it's already less critical than before. With an 8 pixel font you got roughly 40 characters per line.

The Spanish texts are ok on wider displays but these texts also need to work on 320x200.

[wildweasel]

Is there some potential for the intermission text screens to support auto word wrap? Then it can happen dynamically based on language and screen aspect ratio without having to exhaustively test every string in every language in every resolution setting.

If desired, I can split this into a Feature Suggestion instead.

[Graf Zahl]

No, because they expect the text to be formatted and undoing 25 years of precedent here is not going to be easy.
They also have only a limited number of lines available. For the Spanish texts it's very likely that some need shortening.

[Firebrand]

Well, there are a lot of gaps for the Spanish language, lol XD.

I think I can add them, but it will take a while at the rhythm I'm able to work on it, surely that won't be any problem, worked on some of them today, but I would like to ask, is there a way in which I could use this spreadsheet to generate a language file for Spanish language? Before submitting my changes, I would like to make sure things are looking fine.

I created a local copy of the sheet you made, so I can edit it on my own and once I'm happy with changes, paste them to the original file in google docs. Once I test some of the changes in the game, I'll be able to update the sheet you linked in this thread.

[Graf Zahl]

If you grab a new devbuild, from today or newer you can export the spreadsheet as XLSX, rename it language.xlsx, zip it up and load that zip file.
You have to zip it because it's a zip itself and when loaded directly, GZDoom would load its contents as separate lumps.

Also, for any text that directly addresses the player, the gender variations with a and o at the end should be done like in other texts: @[esp_ao].
This doesn't work yet, but this is a planned macro feature for such things.

Otherwise, please be careful. If you do offline edits, you always run the risk that we make competing edits. For example, all the intermission text screens need some reformatting. I only managed to fix Doom 1 and Doom 2 so far, but not Plutonia, TNT or the other games.

I think it'd be better to make the changes online, because then they can be reviewed immediately