Vega Strike Forums

When I read Gorrünwe's thread about a French
translation I thought about a German translation of Vegastrike which could be
interesting too.
This translation would not only benefit german players but could also help to win more german vegastrike players because most people here in Germany are too lazy ot play a game in a foreign language (sigh)

Of course a translation means a lot of work but i think it'll be
worth at least trying it.

From what I understand, there are technical hurdles that need to be overcome before actual translation work can commence.

peteyg wrote:From what I understand, there are technical hurdles that need to be overcome before actual translation work can commence.

Still, no harm in starting to put translations together - even if only news, missions etc - better than nothing.

Congratulations for your idea Itercap!

If you decide to made a german translation of Vega Strike, i suggest we work together: after all, we'll use the same files to translate this game in our respectly natives languages!

hm, sounds like a good idea. lets see if I can find some time to help u out with the german translation.

maybe we can get VS to get i8n support some day

That sounds encouraging.

Sure there will be sometechnical problems
but translating the mission, communication,...
files will be the biggest part of work.

Yes, we'll have to translate the same files
maybe we could make a list of files whichs
content can be translated directly whithout
having to make bigger changes, for example the XML-data.

That post above was mine
I got logged off...

Anyway, for translating: Which problems
are already known except the gettext issue?

Having a GUI config editor will help immensely. We can't change the names of the configuration variables to words in other language, because they're actual variables. With a GUI, we'd only have to "refer to them," and we could refer to them by any name we like, as well as adding descriptions and such.

ltercap wrote:Which problems
are already known except the gettext issue?

The only real other one is a lack of accented characters available in the fonts.......but this isn't a showstopper? Either way, if you want translations you're going to have to live without accents for a while

Dan.a

dandandaman wrote:

ltercap wrote:Which problems
are already known except the gettext issue?

The only real other one is a lack of accented characters available in the fonts.......but this isn't a showstopper? Either way, if you want translations you're going to have to live without accents for a while

Dan.a

that's waht i do: writing french without accent. And it is very confortable to read!
But, maybe, a without-accent-german-translation will bring more problems...

Gorrünwe wrote:But, maybe, a without-accent-german-translation will bring more problems...

Normally it's no problem writing or reading without 'special characters' in german,
but it looks really unprofessional and i bet that a lot of ppl would just complain (so it's probably the same as in french)

Pontiac

pontiac wrote:(so it's probably the same as in french)

Pontiac

Not really. My compatriots will first be happy, before all...
... As Vega Strike is great, they think (for these who i know)it's too bad they cannot understand the whole game...

The German language has only three 'special
charackters' that don't appear in the fonts.
Normally you can replace them whith special
diphtongues but as pontiac said, that looks unprofessional.

I don't think it's needed to change the names
of the variables but there's one point i'm not
sure about: Are the cargo names variables and if
they are, can we change them whithout further changes?

the cargo names are all data side. They're just text, and can be changed without issue. Cargo categories have a few tricks to them at present (in terms of upgrades), and it's not so clear that those can be as easily altered. But the individual pieces of cargo themselves can certainly be renamed without issue.

ltercap wrote:...I don't think it's needed to change the names of the variables...

I should clarify what I meant to say. In vegastrike.config, we have entries such as "missl_sel_key" or "weap_sel_key," which in reality aren't in any language at all. They're just "close" to English. So if you don't speak English, you're probably going to have a great deal of difficulty trying to edit the config file. And these entries can't be changed to other languages easily because they correspond with variables, right?

If we come up with a GUI, the users would never have to see these messy names -- we could create a "description file" that would contain names and descriptions of game functions and actions. So when we wanted to edit the key for "missl_sel_key," we'd never actually see that name -- we'd scroll down to "Missle Select [forward]," and a little description would pop up, saying "Cycle through availible missiles." Or whatever words and descriptions apply in your language.

That's what I was trying to describe.

To make editing the config file easier for those who don't speak English it would be sufficient at first to insert comments in the
corresponding language. So it would be clear what the variable's names mean. But you are right a GUI would be a much better choice.

If vegastrike is going to do this, then I would recommend doing it correctly. what I mean by that is instead of embedding the language into the missions, create a master language file and then reference the language in the game via ID number or something.. Many open source programs do this. The bittorrent client Azureus does this. The worse thing to do right now it recluttler the missions files even more.

Too difficult for me!
I haven't a lor of knowledges concerning programation... All i know is to translate.. No more...

Gorrünwe wrote:Too difficult for me!
I haven't a lor of knowledges concerning programation... All i know is to translate.. No more...

Its actually a simple concept.

You have a sentence, and for every unique sentence, you give it an ID#

Example: Hi there! How are you? My name is Matt. What is yours?

Becomes [ENG000001] [ENG000002] [ENG000003] [ENG000004]

Then the translate it, all the “prefixsâ€

Yes, i see the concept. But i think the most difficult is to code the "link" beetween [FRAxxx] and "Bonjour là", for example...

How can one manage to do this?

This is something that the "Developers" will have to worry about. My guess is someone will create a script to pull out all the text, find duplicates, and replace with ID strings. This information would then be saved in a single file with the ...Blah blah blah…. then all you would need to do is convert each line one by one.

Im lazy they know what they need to do providing they are going to go this way.

My dear mkruer, you have a curious conception of a collaborative work...


More seriously, which kind of mad person could start such a project???

Gorrünwe wrote:My dear mkruer, you have a curious conception of a collaborative work...


More seriously, which kind of mad person could start such a project???

Someone with alot more motovation then I do

mkruer wrote:

Gorrünwe wrote:My dear mkruer, you have a curious conception of a collaborative work...


More seriously, which kind of mad person could start such a project???

Someone with alot more motovation then I do

Do you think about a particular person?

i think that instead of making the pull-outs as atomic as possible, you should make them complete for any instance.

i.e. 1 document at a time, and reference the document with a filename or ID (pointer to a section of a larger piece of text)

if you make the indexing too tight, you have to worry about syntax. and languages don't share 100% syntax. so you'd get some stupid jap-english sounding translations.

1 document at a time means someone can freely write an equivalent block of text in a sensible manner that conveys the equivalenty meaning, without syntax problems of the original language.

-scheherazade