Vega Strike Forums

mkruer's phrases were short, yes, but you'll notice that they were also complete sentences. If we follow the guideline of using complete sentences as a text portion, we should be in pretty good shape.

Another thing about such a method. Translation is not a "robotic" discipline. Translate a sentence, without show the main idea in it, is not a true translation.

Let me give an example: in english, it is current to use "today" (or "yesterday", "tomorrow", etc...) in the middle or at the end of a sentence, even if it's a long one.
However, in french, use such words at the middle/end of long sentences is not natural. In this case, we always put them at the beginning.

So, in this particular case (and there are many other problematic cases such as this one!), i can't see other solutions than put the whole sentence in a variable...

There's a lot of fine localisation technology out there. It's not too tough a job to implement your own, though.
The problem will be to integrate that into VS, as obviously it was not intended to do so.
It's easiest to have corresponding strings in about the same place in a file.
I also think VS is not in the state to be translated. Translation incorporates a certain time lag... some things are changed, that are not translated yet, etc.

ltercap wrote:When I read Gorrünwe's thread about a French
translation I thought about a German translation of Vegastrike which could be
interesting too.

Mittlerweile, wir sind zwei Forumseiten allseitiger Zustimmung weiter, ist immer noch kein Wort zu Papier gebracht.. Es wäääähre ja schon mal eine That fürwahr wenns ein deutsches Manual gäbe, jawohl.

Best from Berlin, Allons!

allerdings.

starting a german wiki shouldnt be a problem at all.

What I read so far reminds me of .po files and gettext. Im not sure wheter the concept is really as easy as it reads (http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/ ... ttext.html), but if it would make more sense than 'brewing our own' solution here.
I always wanted to try translating some parts of vs using po files, but never found the time to really get into it.
Can anyone comment on how difficult/ work intense this could get?

[quote="fizze"]allerdings.

starting a german wiki shouldnt be a problem at all.[/quote]

indeed, i´d also like to say that starting a german wiki shouldnt be a problem at all. 8)

ok, honestly, i am starting right at the Top of the Wiki FAQ translating. Doing just 10 minutes of translation a day is also ok for my employer.

Shall i post the material into this thread for correction or what do you all think ?

Greetz, Allons!

The reason the Wiki's there is that you can put material directly online and let people correct stuff as needed .

Ari Rahikkala wrote:The reason the Wiki's there is that you can put material directly online and let people correct stuff as needed .

Yessir, <cough> but will my german translations be welcome in an english Wiki ?

I dought it. Starting a whole new Wiki for translations would be another question naturally, but is there any ?

Greetz to Suomi if i am correct, Allons!

Allons! wrote: Starting a whole new Wiki for translations would be another question naturally, but is there any ?

Given the current state of VS, and, more importantly, the negligible existing (one himagines this will change eventually) internal support in the VS engine for translation, I think the most profitable expenditure of time for translators would be in creating translations of such documentation as can be found in the Wiki.

As to where to put them, put them in the same Wiki - just put links at the first page of the Wiki to an alternate "first" page of the Wiki in the language of choice and proceed from there. Until VS matures a bit more, being able to read documentation seems nearly as much of an impediment to game play as being able to read in-game text .

But, what do I know - I'm the punchline for the joke:
Q:"What do you call someone who speaks lots of languages?"
A:"A polyglot"
Q:"What about 3 languages?"
A:"Tri-lingual, I guess"
Q:"What about 2 languages?"
A:"Bilingual
Q:"What about 1 language?"
A:"An American"

It's a shame really. They don't start language education until we're ~ 12-14 years old around here, and they only require a year or two of studies. The tragedy of this has become all the more sadly amusing to me after I spent a week in another country surrounded by people who'd had 9-10 years of english classes, and were still given to feelings of awkwardness when conversing in english because they didn't have native fluency. However, centuries of isolationism and not necessarily healthy cultural traditions are hard to break, especially when US schools have the financial problems that they do...

well currently the only thing stopping us from basic foreign language support (i.e. languages that can be done with ASCII font) is the location of an equivalent to gettext for WINDOWS... sure gettext solves our problem in linux--but how are we supposed to do this in windows... I know I could compile gettext for win, but then I'm stuck linking with a bunch of gnu stuff that I woudl just asoon avoid for the main engine

Greetings !
I read the discussion of the Translation Idea. I have an Idea how to work around the problem that Vega Strike is not made with the ability translate the texts at the moment.

The Idea is quite Simple. Instead of translate sentence by sentence I like the Idea of translating complete Texts more. It will feel and look better if the translation is concentrated on the information not on the words.
I would sougest we translate the vital files and put the translation in seperate direktories (under the game home say here /opt/vegastrike/ )
like
./de/missions/
./en/missions/
./fr/missions/
when starting the game the native language variable will be read and used to set the symlinks to the correct language.

But this wont work under windows (Mac I do know less, so i am less sure but I heared that mac is also based on UNIX so there might be a similar way of solving this)
for windows we would need a little prog which "copies" the wisched languges in theire place.

In future the next steps could be:
1) pathes to mission and other files are set through Vegastrike
2) language and game Informations get fileseperated.

This is my first Idea I had while reading this thread, I am not sure if this actually is a realistic Idea but at least it sounds good (and easy) to me.

Peter

Allons! wrote:Yessir, <cough> but will my german translations be welcome in an english Wiki ?

I dought it. Starting a whole new Wiki for translations would be another question naturally, but is there any ?

Greetz to Suomi if i am correct, Allons!

Allons,

Apologies, didn't notice this sooner.

As long as we have storage size, then I would recommend for each information page in the wiki, having a reflected language page (German, French, Russian and so on). The first page would have links to each language page, but also each and every other page should have links to their mirrored language pages e.g. Manual Introduction page (in English), has a link to the Manual Introduction page in German, French etc, and those pages link between the other pages too.

The only problem with doing this is that the wiki information is changed and updated semi regularly. So if new information is recorded on the English page, the other pages need someone to update, and if someone updates say the German page, needs someone who reads German and knows English to update the English page.

Not impossible, but can be done.

I would prefer a CVS for Translating that keeps the translating straightforward.

Concerning gettext: How about using one of the several native Win32 ports.
See:
http://home.a-city.de/franco.bez/gettex ... win32.html
http://gettext.sourceforge.net/

(I don't know if this helps because I'm not a programmer)

And if you need help translating, I'm there to help

Greetings,
delirium

[quote="hellcatv"]well currently the only thing stopping us from basic foreign language support (i.e. languages that can be done with ASCII font) is the location of an equivalent to gettext for WINDOWS... sure gettext solves our problem in linux--but how are we supposed to do this in windows... I know I could compile gettext for win, but then I'm stuck linking with a bunch of gnu stuff that I woudl just asoon avoid for the main engine[/quote

well yeah, but what about unicode ? *ducks to avoid bashing*
normally unicode should be compatible to ansi code, depending on the system its compiling on...

while, I think that might be overkill maybe just formatting those extra-letters like it is done in HTML ? &uuml and &auml etc ? or with their corresponding multibyte-escape characters ? i dont really know, either wouldnt be "not nice" in terms of programming, but what the heck, as long as it works.

so, as to get the german trans going ? Why dont we use the wiki seriously ?
and how difficult is it to get another wiki going on another server anywhere ? doesnt sf supply these too ? :noclue:

Hallo guys!

I'm completely new to VegaStrike but because I'm from Germany I would very much like to help translating it, the documentation or the Wiki into German.

thanks in advance
Argh

as we are in the processs of migrating the wiki to a new platform, sup with this topic ?

Well, wikipedia has support for many different versions of a page all in different languages. MediaWiki is the same software used there, so I'd imagine our new wiki would be able to support multiple languages nicely.

I would help translating, too but i don't really know programming well
if had the texts, i would translate them...

what about translating the internet pages first?
some little flags to click on in the upper right corner would look nice, don't you think?
i thionk it would not be very hard to translate this pages,(except the forum),i would do that, if you like

Halleck wrote:Well, wikipedia has support for many different versions of a page all in different languages. MediaWiki is the same software used there, so I'd imagine our new wiki would be able to support multiple languages nicely.

Yes, wikipedia has support for different languages, but the description in the wikipedia-howtos do not work in the mediawiki (by default i think).

Does anybody know how to do that?

Pontiac

Hello, anyone still there?

I stumbled across this great project a few days ago and wondered how I could possibly be of help. So i checked if there's any German translation of the manual included in the VS-download and well, I didn't find one.

Is it just my inability to search thoroughly the internet, or is there really no german translation available? Just for fun I translated the Contents (first four pages of the Vega_Strike_Players_Guide.pdf), maybe I could do some more? Anyone already / still engaged in such a project? Would be a bit unproductive , if two people would do the same thing... :)

hm, no clue.
I realized the VS site had lots of problems lately....
good to see there's activity in here.

Dreamweb wrote:Hello, anyone still there?

I stumbled across this great project a few days ago and wondered how I could possibly be of help. So i checked if there's any German translation of the manual included in the VS-download and well, I didn't find one.

Is it just my inability to search thoroughly the internet, or is there really no german translation available? Just for fun I translated the Contents (first four pages of the Vega_Strike_Players_Guide.pdf), maybe I could do some more? Anyone already / still engaged in such a project? Would be a bit unproductive , if two people would do the same thing...

I don't think there is anything formal in the data repository, nor is there anything in the wiki (AFAIK). Best place to check and work is in the wiki area, as everything is kept up to date as far as possible. In the main, the .pdf is just a conversion of the wiki information at any one given time, so the wiki is the prime source of material.

Well thx for the replies...

I searched the wiki and didn't find any german translation, too. Up to now I translated the manual up to point 5 (Mission statement) as I'm a bit short on time right now (exams). The wiki is of course more up to date than the pdf, but it's much more practicable for me to use the pdf as source, as it allows a "linear" translation from the contents to the appendix. Additionally I've got only a 56k modem connect here, which forces me to better work offline.

Hmm, maybe I can post the translated parts somewhere in the wiki - although I really don`t know where exactly. I better not fiddle around with the structure of the wiki, think that would do more harm than good.

Any suggestions for an at least temporary place? Maybe just a small, simple "german language" section or somthing like that? At least it could be possible that such a beginning will encourage more people to start translating (as I really can't translate the 80 pages in a resonable time....)

@ Administrators,

Can the wiki (size wise) handle multiple page versions in different languages? I.e. Primary page = English (say), with a link to other language versions of that page? Dreamweb could then store his translations online - but will only work if storage is sufficient.

@ Dreamweb,

Doing translations is all good, but please note that since VS is a continual work in progress, the wiki (manual, howtos etc) is constantly updated and changed. I only know English, so that's where I work. Obviously, other language pages would then need to be updated. Still, as most changes are minor, it may still be worthwhile working on the wiki.

As to working offline, easy way to do it is to 'edit' a page to get the source page information, and save it to a text file on your computer. Do that for multiple pages while online. When offline, edit the pages appropriately. When back online, 'edit' and insert your changed source information. That's how I do it at home.

Silverain