Author Topic: Translations: what is the point?  (Read 46002 times)

Offline Kulyok

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Translations: what is the point?
« on: February 17, 2006, 07:47:01 AM »
Yes, version 1 covers all SoA content. There are typos, and I may tweak a few lines later, but still, it is pretty much "done".
Yes, .TRA files are already available. And yes, since the mod size is ~7.7mb, they are easy to download.
Yes, some people say that this mod is interesting.

But tell me, what is the point? There are seven thousand lines. I spent two weeks on Russian translation, and I still face about three-fourths of the work.

It is hopeless.


However, if you are interested, please, sign up here with some means to contact you, and, of course, your language. If you are interested in collaboration and splitting up the work, please, mention this, as well. Of course, if you prefer to work alone, in darkness and in secret *ahem*, you are free to do so, as well.

This thread may also serve for posting updates from time to time. :)

It may be wise to play the mod first, to see whether it is really worth the effort of trying. But it is up to you.


Motherland... er, Xan Readme will not forget you. Good luck!

Offline Grim Squeaker

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2006, 09:21:11 AM »
My recommendation would be to avoid starting any translations until after the first wave of bug reports, typos and miscellaneous have come back, meaning the bulk of any potential tweaks are out of the way.  You said yourself its a pain in the arse translating, so I imagine it'd be even worse to have to go back and alter translations already written because of a few cockups.
"You alone can make my song take flight..."

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #2 on: February 17, 2006, 10:10:32 AM »
I am not sure that I agree, because
1) translating is the pain in... ah... different parts anyway;
2) correcting typos and grammar won't have any effect on translation.

Also, this is definitely not a beta. I won't be adding much to already existing dialogue - extra dialogue options being an exception, of course. In the worst case, changes will equal to adding several lines in the end of the file.

Bluntly put, this summer Russian players will play Xan. If, say, other translators will start next November, then, assuming they _finish_, perhaps their players will play Xan in 2010. Assuming, um, anybody still plays Baldur's Gate II.

So... everything is up to the translators. I am fine either way. :)

Offline manuel

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #3 on: February 17, 2006, 01:30:07 PM »
Hey, please release some translations! All good BG2 mods are not at least famous for their translations. Because of that tradition pocketplane is much better than the spellhold studios!

Offline Rodman49

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2006, 10:49:51 AM »
But tell me, what is the point? There are seven thousand lines.

Wow, 7k lines, that's incredible - maybe you could cut some for the translation?

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2006, 10:58:30 AM »
Wow, 7k lines, that's incredible - maybe you could cut some for the translation?

Then it would be a different mod. But cooperating with other translators can solve the problem of volume, I think.
For example, Aerie.ru translators(three of them) translated Fade Romance mod(roughly five thousand lines) into Russian in several months - and their translation is readable. So, everything is in your hands.

Offline Ascension64

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #6 on: February 22, 2006, 05:44:10 AM »
Since I am currently dealing with five translations for certain BGT-WeiDU and mods at this time, I'll put forward my experiences:
1. Pain in the ass.  I don't know this project well enough to ascertain any re-wording of sentences and consistency changes to dialogue, but when you have to start asking people for one-liners every week, it feels like the translation will never get completely finished
2. Testing.  I won't have a go at translators here, because I feel that they are doing an excellently, but honestly, I really don't know if the translation is correct or not.  You would have to send a test version back to the translator to make sure everything looks OK (and in one case, one translator reported that he had made typos and had to correct himself!), and even then, since you only have one point of view, the relevant language community might have quirks with the way certain things are phrased.  For a commercial example, Ascaron Entertainment received some appalling feedback from the French community for the absolutely dreadful translation that was made to Sacred
3. Lotsa lines.  Yes, people get dispirited when they scroll down and find that it takes them 60 page downs to get to the bottom of the file.  As you said, trying to divide them up between many translators is a nice idea (like the Italian translations for BGT-WeiDU at the moment).  It works OK provided there is communication between the people concerned, but at the end of the day, it still needs checking and refining.  When you have several thousand lines, that's a lot of checking and refining
4. Encoding issues.  You have to work out how to ensure that DOS encoding (for WeiDU prompts etc.) retains all the special characters that other languages have (even your Russian, Kulyok, will need to make sure you use the code page 866 encoding - I hope you know what that is!).  All in-game text will require standard ANSI encoding.  And no, unicode WILL NOT WORK.  Very careful attention needs to be placed on making sure that you don't accidentally save a file in the wrong encoding and screw up the entire text viewed on the screen.  I had to work around all this using three dodgy notepad replacement programs in tandem.  Windows XP language settings don't allow code page cross-compatibility.

Overall, I really recommend patience.  Don't get excited about setting deadlines and such.  Don't be pressured by the community to make the translation.  Perhaps even set 30 minutes per day to do 50 lines.  I wouldn't recommend barraging into it all, because you start wondering why the hell you are doing it.  Hence this thread.  ;)

So that is my spiel on the issue.  Good luck!

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #7 on: February 22, 2006, 07:05:21 AM »

Thank you for these helpful hints. I would like to add that checking your local community is a good idea, since Baldur's Gate may not offer support for some of the characters. The Russian letter "Ё", for example, is not displayed in the game even in ANSI encoding, and we Russian translatiors have to make do with "Е".

yarpi :)

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2006, 04:52:16 AM »
Heh... I'm translator too. Polish translator. And I tell you something. NPC translation is the wortest thing which I ever must to do. I've made Mur'Neth tra, and going to Kivan & Saerelith.

I'm so fast. I've made Refinements tra in one week. But Mury... I've tra him one month. And always you mast check, fix... if you made in translation one fix, you must test the instalation. One ~ begone and translation is failed. I've made something like that in Divine Remixes translation...

And I translate mods for a... hmm... 30 peoples?

I don't translate Xan - sorry. I don't like him :P

PS. I've got similar problaims with codding. If i try to send ę ą bźdź (who can read that? :D ) in mail.... It's the end :)

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2006, 06:18:55 AM »
NPC translation is the wortest thing which I ever must to do. I've made Mur'Neth tra, and going to Kivan & Saerelith.

Quote
I don't translate Xan - sorry. I don't like him :P

Okay.  :)
(I LIKE my forum!)

Good luck with Kivan and Saerileth.

Immortality

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #10 on: March 28, 2006, 09:06:43 AM »
A friend of mine will give it a try with a spanish translation, ok? :)

Ill send it to you as soon as i have it :)

Cya soon!

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #11 on: March 28, 2006, 11:31:15 AM »
Sure. :) That makes it three future translations already...

Silver

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #12 on: May 30, 2006, 02:38:15 PM »
Heh... I'm translator too. Polish translator. And I tell you something. NPC translation is the wortest thing which I ever must to do. I've made Mur'Neth tra, and going to Kivan & Saerelith.

I'm so fast. I've made Refinements tra in one week. But Mury... I've tra him one month. And always you mast check, fix... if you made in translation one fix, you must test the instalation. One ~ begone and translation is failed. I've made something like that in Divine Remixes translation...

And I translate mods for a... hmm... 30 peoples?

I don't translate Xan - sorry. I don't like him :P

PS. I've got similar problaims with codding. If i try to send ę ą bźdź (who can read that? :D ) in mail.... It's the end :)

Polish translations ... I never install them although I'm Polish... the letters are all mixed up always because the coding doesnt support polish letters like ą...

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #13 on: June 22, 2006, 08:30:00 AM »
So! Russian translation is done - SoA only, of course.

During the course of the following week I'd like to hear how other translations are going. German, Spanish - any others? Or perhaps you'd like to offer help? This thread or PM will do fine.

And best of luck to you - having translated nearly 700kb of text, I understand how it is.

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #14 on: June 22, 2006, 02:02:46 PM »
And one more thing: we have a very good German translator on the team, who's made considerable progress, but it is very, very hard for her to go through hundreds of lines alone. If you are interested in helping her, and feel like translating some of the dialogues, please, post here or contact me via PM.

Thank you. :)

Offline Silver

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #15 on: June 23, 2006, 02:37:19 AM »
I could offer my help as a polish translator if someone would explain a few details... or could I just send an uncoded version?

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #16 on: June 23, 2006, 06:59:24 AM »
If you just replace English text with Polish text, it will work. Like this:

English
@1 = ~Life is so hollow.~

Russian
@1 = ~Жизнь невыносима.~

However, be aware that it is a really, really large amount of work.

Offline Silver

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #17 on: June 23, 2006, 01:03:41 PM »
hmmm when I try to save it like that I get a message it won't sustain it's coding...

Offline Kulyok

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #18 on: June 23, 2006, 02:15:35 PM »
Sure enough, that's why I always recommend the users to visit their native forum to get more information. For example, for Russian users http://forums.aerie-ru.info contains many useful tips (and several pages on me bashing dialogue in Vlad's mods, but that's another question entirely). I am not sure what the Polish forum for BG2 will be... perhaps http://modlist.pocketplane.net will have a tip?

Offline Silver

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #19 on: June 24, 2006, 03:44:59 PM »
I'll try to search, I'll let ya know if I found something

Offline yarpen

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #20 on: June 26, 2006, 03:24:18 PM »
All right. Me and Silver do that :) But firstly I must end some thing with my forum and BG1 UB :D

Offline Silver

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #21 on: June 27, 2006, 01:09:29 AM »
there's a whole lot but methinks in 2 we should get the hang of it. Maybe my friend could help too, that would make 3 of us.
I have to finish my uni 'stuffs' but that won't take long.
yarpen, pm me when you're donewith that BG1 stuff!

btw I guess I should download the newest version with all the changes...
« Last Edit: June 27, 2006, 01:12:45 AM by Silver »

Nithavela

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #22 on: July 28, 2006, 07:21:58 PM »
Ill do some of your german lines if you are interested.

Offline red*eyes

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #23 on: July 30, 2006, 05:04:58 AM »
I'd really be glad for the help. Can you pm me your email adress or any other way of further contacting you? :)

Offline berelinde

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Re: Translations: what is the point?
« Reply #24 on: July 30, 2006, 08:41:59 AM »
Forgive me if this is stating the obvious.

First, I make a copy of the .d file, and name it something else. I like to work from the .d file as opposed to the .tra file, because you can then identify the speaker and context.

When I'm translating, I work from the .d file, open in notepad. I have a word processing window open, too.

I select the text I want to translate, the "blah blah blah" inside the ~blah blah blah~, leaving out the tildes, copy and paste it to the word processing window, then translate it in the word processing window.

I then select the translated text and copy and paste it back over the original text (still selected in notepad, which is convenient), and no coding symbols are lost.

I make all the changes to the new .d file, leaving the original alone in case I have to go back and make changes. I make notes to the Word document with my translation, identifying speaker and context, and I save that, too.

It's surprisingly fast.

 

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