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

[Graf Zahl]

Here's something very interesting.

At work we've been toying around with ChatGPT for the last few weeks - and having a Ukrainian intern right now I gave ChatGPT all the Doom obituaries along with an explanation of the placeholders and asked it to translate them into Ukrainian, as both male and female form - and apparently the translation was quite good. Deepl only produced gibberish out of these because it was totally helpless with the placeholder and has no means to set the needed parameters. ChatGPT was also a lot more consistent with the phrasing, so this may be a handy tool to deal with the notoriouisly hard to handle obits.

[Gez]

ChatGPT, at its core, works by guessing the most likely next word, and then iterating to guess the word after that, and so on. So it can provide pretty good texts, depending on the size of its corpus for the given language. The texts themselves may be meaningless drivel (it's quite easy to trick it into writing complete nonsense; an easy way is to ask it for a list of sources and references and it'll happily invent a whole lot of papers that have never existed), but they'll be written in a cogent and coherent way, without much grammar or spelling mistakes.

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, you have to teach it up front for the correct terms it should use, but for highly specific text the ability to put the text into a context is often half the solution to a problem. Neither Deepl nor Google Translate can do that.

If you just have generic text without special terms there's not really much advantage here, but the obituaries in particular were always something Deepl had massive problems with and always required most manual work of the languages I had reviewed. On the other side the Strife dialogues had always been the least problematic content.

[Graf Zahl]

I just added 8 new texts to the sheets.
These are for the upcoming menu redesign for the 5.0 release. While that is still some time off, I want to give translators the ability to add translations now.

[Julian_L]

Esperanto doesn't have a word for "sprite". What is its meaning all the times it's mentioned in the file? The player? The NPCs? The weapons? The collectables? Any interactive thing?

By the way, do we have to wait until the next update to see the new translations? I'm seeing the same texts since the month I joined the file (December) to correct them.

[Graf Zahl]

If Esperanto doesn't have a word for Sprite (just like very much any other language which adopted the English term) can't you just use 'sprite'?

Regarding updates, we do not frequently pull the texts unless important additions are being made. The released EXEs will not do live updates, but the most recent devbuild should be a few months more recent.
BTW, 4.11 will be relased this weekend.