Translation Management and Community

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Greendogo
Posts: 1467
Joined: 26 Aug 2011, 02:04

Translation Management and Community

Post by Greendogo »

Hey Team, I'm not normally a translation guy. I speak English as a first language and I've always had the privilege of being able to play everything straight from the publisher for 30 years, no problem.

However, after many years being alive, I have acquired many friends whose languages of origination are many. Kazakh, Persian, obscure African or indigenous languages of America or Australia.

Now, Morrowind is not an English game only. It has quite a few translations into many languages. However, I was wondering if anyone has any desire to discuss starting a translation project which would work over one of the original translation releases of the game in OpenMW, maybe even new translations into our current languages.

I'm thinking of how this would be the easiest to maintain and get feedback. I'm a software engineer, so I think a simple wordpress page with a backend database and a ratings system would be the best way to allow publicly accessible translations of a standard versionabe corpus of text. Then, hopefully it would be easy enough to turn a single language version from that database into an OpenMW plug-in.

Thoughts? Are there any other options here?
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lysol
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Joined: 26 Mar 2013, 01:48
Location: Sweden

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by lysol »

What exactly are you thinking of? Translating the engine itself or making new, fan-made, Morrowind translations? The latter is a cool idea, although it doesn't really need OpenMW to be possible to do. The former... well, that more or less only means the launcher with a few exceptions, right?

Anyway, maybe a bit off topic, but regarding translations in general: The older I get, the more I appreciate translations (I hate dubbed movies though, but subtitles are great). When I was younger, I was like "who cares about games in your own language, I understand English well enough so why does it matter?", but reading something in your native tounge is different, regardless if you are really fluent in English. We also have this "problem" or whatever in Sweden that youth use more and more English into their day-to-day speech, eventually making them less fluent in ther native language, which is a bit sad imo. I think this is even more sad when you think about really small languages that might end up extinct soon.

So while English is great as a lingua franca, I'd say don't forget your mother language :) So go translations!
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Husaco
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Joined: 07 Aug 2011, 11:54
Location: Australia

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by Husaco »

I think Greendogo is referring to developing a localisation framework for content. I know Zini has talked in the past about de-hardcoding strings in the engine to allow localisations there as a (post-) 1.0 goal, which is certainly achievable, but content is a different kettle of fish. Localising content is certainly possibly with vanilla tools, and many official and fan translations exist of the main game and even some mods, but it would be nice to have a modern drop-in localisation framework that Morrowind lacks. The CS sees little to no development for even the most rudimentary features, and so direction is pretty vague. I believe in later games you can change language in-menu, if not on the fly, so Bethesda must have developed something for later games' files, but I haven't looked into it at all.

Personally, I think it's always better to read in the original language unless the translation is manifestly transformative, but translation is definitely the next best thing when you don't speak the language, and I appreciate the breadth of translated works that are available nowadays particularly as an English speaker.
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AnyOldName3
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Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Localisation of content has been a post-1.0 goal for a long time. It's just it'll require ESM format changes to do it in a more modern way (where the strings live outside the content files in a separate database so you don't need to swap out everything just to swap the strings).
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Atahualpa
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Joined: 09 Feb 2016, 20:03

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by Atahualpa »

For the record, here's the corresponding section from Zini's post-1.0 design document.

(Note that the document itself is (at least partially) outdated, so take everything written there with a grain of salt.)
Chris
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Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by Chris »

The engine will also need to support UTF-8 content files to do it correctly. Currently there's a config setting to interpret content files as being one of a select few code pages (like the original engine data expects), which is less than ideal on its own, but also limits the possible languages/character sets to write text in.
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bmw
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Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by bmw »

I've been using Project Fluent with Portmod, and plan on using it with the text-based plugin system I'm working on (haven't been doing a lot on that recently; I've been busy with other things, but it's mostly working (as an external tool translating text plugins into esps)). I haven't started adding support for localization yet, but fluent seems to fit the ideas mentioned in the previously linked design document, given that it uses identifiers, rather than the original text, to identify localized strings. It also has a very capable language for handling things such as pluralizations and other ways that the translation might vary based on variables in the localized string, and for that reason alone, I would recommend using an existing framework over creating something custom (not that the design document is particularly clear on this point, and I get that it's out of date, but it seems to indicate the use of a custom system).

Mozilla's also written a really useful-looking tool called Pontoon which would be great for organizing such translation work, and would even allow for an interface for translating openmw and various mods and related projects like portmod in the same place.

I've got a pontoon instance set up which I've been trying out: https://portmod-l10n.herokuapp.com/projects/. I'd gladly let this also be used for openmw and any related projects.
A better example if you want to see it in use would be https://pontoon.mozilla.org/projects/
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Greendogo
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Joined: 26 Aug 2011, 02:04

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by Greendogo »

I just reviewed Pontoon and it's pretty neat. I took a look at their implementation here: https://mozilla-pontoon-staging.herokuapp.com/teams/

Let's assume we use Pontoon or something like it.

The next step would be to figure out how to remove our text into localization files.

Edit: Also, for engine/cs development, here are some ideas from how Unreal engine does things:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Gam ... index.html
ervinkeel2001
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Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/markpundsack

Re: Translation Management and Community

Post by ervinkeel2001 »

It also has a very capable language for handling things such as pluralizations and other ways that the translation might vary based on variables in the localized string, and for that reason alone, I would recommend using an existing framework over creating something custom
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