Delores: Italian translation

I thought Italian was a complicated language, now I realize there’s something worse!

English: a / an
Italian: un / uno / un’ / una
(depending on gender and initial letter)

English: the
Italian: il / lo / la / i / gli / le / l’
(depending on gender, initial letter and singular or plural)

English: of the
Italian: dello, della, degli, delle, dell’
(depending on gender, initial letter and singular or plural)

English: in the
Italian: nello, nella, negli, nelle, nell’
(depending on gender, initial letter and singular or plural)

I love English.

3 Likes

It should be done! :sweat:

Now… the images. But at least the text can be playtested. I’ll put the file on my github so who’s interested can have a look (mainly the Italians again, but anyone interested of course)

Here it is. The dynamic text is 100% in Italian. The images aren’t, but at least we can play it.

Once I have enough confidence about the correctness of the text, I’ll open a pull request.

3 Likes

This could be handled with a post-processing pass that scans the final string and (mechanically) merges

“di lo” → “dello”
“da lo” —> “dallo”
“in lo” → “nello”

and so on.

It needn’t be syntax-aware. It’s a relatively easy to implement. Just scan the string and blindly make these subsitutions.

OTOH it’s not needed in English but only in Italian…

1 Like

That’s a neat idea, but hopefully it won’t be necessary since we rephrased everything :smiley: the only way to know is playtesting and… ahem… we need Italians willing to do it :roll_eyes:

@RonGilbert another minor thing that should be kept in mind in case you want to use this interface for for future games.

Some verbs are “recycled” so you have “look in” for cabinet and bathroom mirror.

But in Italian you don’t “look in” a mirror. The same goes for example with “turn on” a faucet and a light, in Italian you “open” a faucet.

It’s not vital for Delores because “turn on” is only used for the faucet, and for “look in” we’ll use a generic “examine” which works in both cases, but future games may need to distinguish between same verbs according to the target

1 Like

Well it was not. But with @ZakPhoenixMcKracken and @Ema we came out with a verb that’s a bit of a stretch but it’s the best we can do.

I think I finished playtesting. I talked around, took pictures, finished the game. I think (or hope) that I caught all untranslated lines and fixed all typos and misgendered articles.

…now, the art!

1 Like

I’m not sure there is a solution to the “turn on” verb problem. Everyone object in the game would need a custom “turn on” verb because languages are so different. What might work for Italian might not work for Russian, Danish or Chinese. Any time you are constructing a sentence you have this issue. It’s why icons are so popular, but they loose any expression. I didn’t want this interface to be screwdriver (gear icon) sink. I wanted it to be “fixed sink with screwdriver” or “short-circuit radios with screw driver”. I want players to know exactly what they are doing.

“Turn on Sink” isn’t proper English either. “Turn on the sink” is. All these text interfaces are like you’re talking to a 3-year old.

3 Likes

That’s why it is important you don’t lose it in translation.

I think the only solution might be to have custom actions for EVERY object, but reading your comment I suppose it’s impossible.
If you could create a single action for every object, it could be named as you like in every language. If needed, you can give it always the same name in english.

I mean:

Action 1 - Turning on the light
English verb - TURN ON
Italian verb - ACCENDI

Action 2 - Turning on twitter notifications
English verb - TURN ON
Italian verb - ATTIVA

Action 3 - Turning on the sink
English verb - TURN ON
Italian vern - APRI

I don’t know, I’m not a developer, it might be an hard work, but maybe not if you code everything like this from scratch in a new game.

The verb ID could stay the same but be changed on the fly before being put to screen.

Like if you have a special override table that says verbID / objectID / new text. Then the translator may add entries for just those combination that don’t make sense.

I’ll try to hack something after we finalize the Italian text.

2 Likes

image

I wanted to add this banner because it’s a hotspot in the game which has its translation.

I’m pretty satisfied with the result.

2 Likes

In French and German too… (ouvrir le robinet, der Wasserhahn öffnen)
In Dutch it’s even worse: (de waterkraan open draaien = “turn open” the faucet)
In my translations of Zak and Maniac Mansion (and MI-EGA :stuck_out_tongue:), I went with “switch on” (zet aan), which works with most objects.

I thought in Delores, the verbs where attached to the objects. So it is probably a matter of not recycling any of them, but allowing each “turn on” to be handled/translated with its own unique ID, depending on the object context.

2 Likes

He’s exaggerating; de kraan open doen/draaien suffices. :wink:

Each object can’t have a separate “open” or “look at” verb, but they can have unique text ids. It’s more work for translator, but it does give the flexibility to make the text be unique and customized for the language.

Not sure if I understood the subtle difference between separate verbs and unique text IDs until I try it. But as a translator (with basic scripting skills) I don’t mind some extra work when the result is better in the end.

The way some parts of text was reused in the original version of Zak -to save as much bytes as possible I guess- made for one hell of a linguistic puzzle to solve. Satisfying when I can pull it off, of course. But frustrating as it is not guaranteed to have solution.

1 Like

Oh really? Which one?

One is an instance in the game’s code, the other its visual representation on screen. Having only one verb in the code means that you just code how the different game objects react to that verb, instead of creating a single verb for every possible object.

In fact, if you have a look at the code in Delores, the reaction for the “turn on” verb isn’t even coded for every object that you can turn on, but it basically says “if the object is in a state called off, offer turn_on and switch to on state on click”.

With a different verb for every object you can’t group reactions like this.

However, text IDs only refer to the act of showing GUIs to the user. So, in code, they’re all the same thing and perform the same actions, but they just show a different string on screen.

Not the C64 (unfortunately) but the second best thing: the V1 version (PC EGA) - ot has the pirate jail and pop goes the weasle on the kazoo. Basically it is like the C64 version with a slightly different color palette (more saturated).

Aha! Makes a lot of sense. Basically the code can stay in English then while all text IDs get translated in all subtle variants for “turn on” for the player to enjoy.

I mean, which linguistic puzzle to solve?

1 Like

For example the 2 sentences:

Here are the artefacts they took!
Here is the artefact they took!

Is split in

Here
is
are
the artefact
s
they took!

Now the article “the” is the same for singular and plural, while it isn’t in other languages (including mine).
Or adding an “s” to go from singular to plural might be sufficient in English, but it might require more or less vowels in the preceding word. (Depending on the context)

Another one:

I better check on the prisoner, he must have lost his mind by now.
I better check on the prisoner, she must have lost her mind by now.

Is split as

I better check on the prisoner,
s
he
must have lost
h
is
er
mind by now.

Or Zak telling Lou: I want to buy the…
Where the translated article can be masculine/feminine/neutral

Animals being referred to as “it”

I should log on my pc to check the details or the trickiest ones- these are just some I remember by heart

Some things are just hard to translate:
Key of Sea Kazoo
Old Spittinu rye

2 Likes