Common translation problems

Delores Engine
41

I went for consistency because I wanted the translation to feel like a part of the original game, but also because I had absolutely nothing against the choices taken by the original Italian translator.

In the end, you choose. But my hope is that the translation ends up also in the official game on Steam etc, so I’d go for consistency anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes
42

Of course to make everyone unhappy (also called a compromise) use “Forensiker” instead :slight_smile:

1 Like
43

I don’t really understand logic behind this:

thimbleweedMap = DEFINE_OBJECT({
	name = TEXT(11123,"map")
	article = TEXT(12370,"a")

historicPhotos = DEFINE_OBJECT({
	name = TEXT(11124,"old news photos")
	photo_name = TEXT(11125,"the old news photos")

What was the reason for using sometimes separate “article” and sometimes “photo_name”? Programming evolution that never got unified?

There are no articles in Czech so I let all this items empty but it displays the number of the text item and the original name instead. Finally it has occurred to me that it does not have to be an article. I could inject another word instead of it (e.g. zobrazující = displaying/depicting, zachycující = capturing) and it will even cover the accusative of the item so it won’t be that bad after all. =)

Anyway, photo_name seems to me like a better (less confusing) alternative of these two.

44

I don’t know about the reason as I’m not the author, but this is what I noticed.

phot_name has been used mostly when the photo description is mostly different from the subject. For example, you have a door whose name is just “door”, but when you take a pic, it’s “the restaurant’s door”.

What I suppose is that as a prototype it started with photo_name but then the game evolved, more hotspots were created, there was no need for an extra description since all of them were “map” -> “a map”, “traffic cone” -> “a traffic cone”, and an automatic description creation was added.

Then article was added for those where “a” didn’t fit (starting with vowel or needing “the”).

photo_name is surely the most useful attribute, but then you’d have to create a photo_name for every single object.

Well, it’s not like I didn’t do it for article… :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes
45

The article was implemented first, and then we added the “photo_name” to get cases where the whole name changed. In retrospect, we should have just had “photo_name”.

It’s also worth nothing that if we were doing voice acting, you can’t build sentences unless they are for display only. Things like “photo_name” would be fully qualified if they were to be spoken: “It’s a photo of the Nickel News door”. Even if they weren’t spoken, I’d probably doing something like this to help translations. Building sentences via string concatenation is a bad idea.

When Delores started out, it wasn’t even going to be released, so we didn’t follow “best practices”.

5 Likes
46

What the hell is “ancient capsipan”?

1 Like
47

I though it was a made up word.

48

Perhaps… but even Inda Glop Oda Krell turned out to be not gibberish. Well not complete random gibberish anyway.

In this case it would be fitting for a really dead language to have even no trace on the internet today.

49

I figured it was some kind of play on capsicum peppers in a pan. Either that or just semi-nonsense sounds stuck together. :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: like this https://www.thespruceeats.com/pan-roasted-peppers-482763

50

Interesting theory (I did not know the word capsicum) but what about the whole sentence?
“The only dead languages we need books on is ancient capsipan.”

It would make more sense if there were “tongues” instead of “languages”… :slightly_smiling_face:

51

I thought its a typo and meant “Caspian”.

52

I thought about it too but that would be two typos in one word (1. swapped “p” and “s” 2. additional “p”)

53

In the whole sentence it’s just a thing that sounds like it could be a language that’s actually referring to something silly.

54

Are you reading Rons Blog? :wink:

1 Like
55

I went for “capsipano”. I thought it was something made up and then I just put an O in the end to make it sound an Italian word :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
56

I was thinking about this at the same time as you did :sweat_smile:

1 Like
57

To me it sounds like IT WAS A VERY LOUD LANGUAGE.

58

… that rhymes with FORTRAN

2 Likes
59

After a long search in the warehouse where they keep the ark, I came across an old tome which links both languages to the even more ancient primal language CAPSLOCKIAN.

4 Likes