Wrap that with SAY() and give it a number and issue a pull request.
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I’m also finished with the TEXT() wrappers. There were a couple of object that had no wrappers in the name too, so I fixed those too.
The only one I’m not 100% sure is “a” for “Philipp’s dangerous device”. It’s currently like this, so my code change won’t affect the game’s behavior, but maybe it could be changed, like for Ransome’s dispensers.
I created a pull with “a” on Philipp’s device.
Looking forward to the generated .tsv, with 103 “a” in a row. That’s going to be crazy for the translators 
You know, back in ~1991 I remember there was an article in a Finnish game magazine about a deal being made between some Finnish game house and Lucasfilm Games for the translation of The Secret of Monkey Island to Finnish, titled “Apinasaaren salaisuus”. I wondered why that never happened. Now I guess it was just too complex to translate.
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The lines have been extracted and it’s pushed.
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A possible solution is to add an extra tab (extra column) in the tsv files that specifies the gender of an object, char or noun so that we could add an IF in the code that would add the proper pronoun or article before the noun. But I don’t know if this is the best approach. It would mostly work for portuguese, at least.
Hi @Rodrigo
As a quick&dirty solution I was planning on publishing here a cheat sheet saying which article refers to which name, so you know the gender.
Given that for a future game with planned translations and/or voice acting Ron will improve the system, I don’t think we need to come up with a flexible solution for Delores 
In a language like German you need to know not just what the gender of the word is, but also what role it plays in the sentence.
Sheerly for “it’s a photo of” + “article” + “noun” that should work since it’s always in the genitive case, but not in a more generalized manner.
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.
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It should be done! 
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.
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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…
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That’s a neat idea, but hopefully it won’t be necessary since we rephrased everything 
the only way to know is playtesting and… ahem… we need Italians willing to do it 
@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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 
), 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.
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