skell
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As many of you might already be aware, Flash DROD is slowly reaching its final stages. At the moment most of the things we are fighting with are small issues, polishing and accessibility things.

One of the sparks that was born in my mind but dug deep under the ashes of everydayness was to give multi-language support. Yesterday this spark was ignited again as someone suggested translating the game to Spanish...

I think it is for the community to decide - would you like to see the game translated into your language?

At the moment, there is about 20 KBytes of text in the game. To translate you should, ideally, be a native speaker of the language you want to translate to and know it rather well grammatically-wise.

Ideally it would be best if each language was done by two people who would work it out together. It's not a requirement. We can do all Left-to-right alphabets including Cyrillic and, probably, logographic alphabets like Chinese or Japanese.

So if you'd like to take part in this feat, just post here with your language of choice and if we gather some nice number of languages the text files will be distributed. If, for some reason, you'd like to stay anonymous, you can PM me.

Languages so far:
- Catalan (Bombadil)
- Dutch (Jutt)
- English (Everyone)
- Finnish (The Architest)
- French (Damien) (Syntax & Emojk)
- German (Znirk & Grizzly)
- Italian (vittro)
- Norwegian (trick)
- Polish (skell)
- Russian (mxvladi & halyavin)
- Spanish (Bombadil & DyRsOfDh14)
- Swedish (Krissan)

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[Last edited by skell at 04-21-2012 01:46 PM]

Syntax
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I can do French though possibly not as well as other French speakers. Been a while since I've had to write in French

Bombadil
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skell wrote:
One of the sparks that was born in my mind but dug deep under the ashes of everydayness was to give multi-language support. Yesterday this spark was ignited again as someone suggested translating the game to Spanish...

I'd like to collaborate in this. I can help with the Spanish translation and add a Catalan translation.

The only characters outside the regular (a-z) alphabet Catalan would need are à, é, è, í, ï, ó, ò, ú, ü, ç, (and their capital versions), and · http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_volat).

skell
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Bombadil wrote:
The only characters outside the regular (a-z) alphabet Catalan would need are à, é, è, í, ï, ó, ò, ú, ü, ç, (and their capital versions), and · http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_volat).

Adding characters with diacritics is not a problem, I did it numerous times in my life (for example Polish has ą, ę, ś, ć, ż, ź, ó, ł, ń, and capitals).

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Emojk
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I'm a native French speaker so I'll gladly volunteer for that - we can work as a team with Syntax if it's more convenient.

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[Last edited by Emojk at 04-19-2012 04:54 PM]

DyRsOfDh14
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I can help a lot with the spanish translation (since I am a native spanish speaker) and I am experienced with translating stuff from spanish to english and vice versa. I won't be much of a problem to me and I would really like to do it.

Znirk
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I can do German. I'm also available for (non-native) proofreading for the Spanish and French teams.

vittro
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I can do Italian, and I'm pretty sure that Neather2 would be happy to cooperate

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The Architest
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I had some school projects and personal matters to do, but I am signing in to translate Flash DROD in Finnish. If needed, of course. I will get myself some Ä and Ö, first.

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[Last edited by The Architest at 04-19-2012 01:56 PM]

skell
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The Architest wrote:
I had some school projects and personal matters to do, but I am signing in to translate Flash DROD in Finnish. If needed, of course. I will get myself some Ä and Ö, first.

Ah yes, such a beautiful language, I always had a soft spot for Scandinavian languages

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Pekka
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But, but, we speak a Uralic language. Grumble

I can also help with the Finnish translation. It's my first language.

Since written English is quite compact relatively speaking, I'm hoping Skell will leave some time for checking that all the translated texts will fit nicely into the provided spaces, if that could possibly be an issue.

mxvladi
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I can help with translating FDROD to Russian language.

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[Last edited by mxvladi at 04-19-2012 03:38 PM]

Jatopian
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Russian has quite a bit translated already I think - we had a Russian version of DROD at some point, which you might ask Mike about - but you will have to watch out for things we may have changed or added.

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halyavin
Level: Delver
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If you need to proof read Russian, count me in.

Odyssey
Level: Master Delver
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I might be able to do Latin

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Someone Else
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I... uh... don't know any other languages well. But I'd be willing to spend the time try to translate it into Klingon as best as possible.

Znirk
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Odyssey wrote:
I might be able to do Latin

BEETHRVS BVDCINNIVS MAGISTER ARTIS EFFLIGENDI.

If you're seriously going there, I'll help.

Jatopian
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You people are crazy.

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skell
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I'll add Nyan then .

Actually I have Nyan language in one of my games...

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Grizzly
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I can help with German. But I've got a question prior to this: What do we do with all the English loanwords? Hold, the Eighth, Roach, Adder, Brain, Tar, the Neather ...
And of course location names.

Should or may these be translated to fitting equivalents of the translation language wherever possible? I for example couldn't think of a German equivalent for Adder that both indicates a snake and an enlarging creature. But keeping the English words would also sound a bit off, because one would try to pronounce Adder like "udder" and couldn't make head or tail of it. And for example it's very difficult for German people to pronounce "Eighth" because of the -th.

Jutt
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I will do Dutch if you like.

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Damien
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I'm willing to proofread/edit the French translation (that's my day job as well).

As for the point raised above by Grizzly, I think that yes, all the terms should be translated. But what would be even better then would be to translate the website as well, so that there are no barriers between that and the game, so people will not lose their points of reference.
But that takes us into a completely different realm...

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Jatopian
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Grizzly wrote:
I can help with German. But I've got a question prior to this: What do we do with all the English loanwords? Hold, the Eighth, Roach, Adder, Brain, Tar, the Neather ...
And of course location names.

This issue calls for a separate thread, I think. Some are non-issues, some you'll just have to figure something out that works in the target language.

Eighth is not a problem so long as the target language has a word for that fraction.

Roach... are there languages without a word for roach? I thought roaches were worldwide. Same for brains and tar.

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skell
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Jatopian wrote:
Roach... are there languages without a word for roach? I thought roaches were worldwide. Same for brains and tar.

I think the problem is more about the fact that someone might translate the words differently back. Tar translated to Polish will be "Smoła" but translated back someone could say Pitch (at least that's what a dictionary tells me). I think the names should stay as they are just for the sake of clarity and future ability to easily reference the names on the forum. Just treat all the names as a proper noun.

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Damien
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Why would anybody translate any of that back ?

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skell
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Damien wrote:
Why would anybody translate any of that back ?

If someone plays the game in a language different than English, and the monster names are translated to that language, and then when they want to ask for help they can either translate it back to English (with a chance of mistranslating it) or use the word that they saw in the game, eg. särki (just got it from google translate).

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Jatopian
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On the other hand, too many words from another language can be hard to keep straight at first, and may discourage newbies.

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SirNiko
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You could include a help page that has the English names of each of the creatures for reference. Just a list of pictures with the name of the creature in English and the current language choice.

For players who play the game in English, this page would effectively be a bestiary, and would be useful for DROD newbies who might be flustered over "Those obnoxious green things, whatever they're called".

Znirk
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skell wrote:
I think the problem is more about the fact that someone might translate the words differently back. Tar translated to Polish will be "Smoła" but translated back someone could say Pitch (at least that's what a dictionary tells me).

Doesn't flashdrod use the voice acting from KDD? Then people will hear the English version while reading the translation. When our hypothetical Pole opens her dictionary, she'll likely be able to figure out that out of the list of translations for Smoła, "Tar" is the one used in the English version of the game.

Jatopian
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That is assuming she knows what sounds English letters make.

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