Delores: Italian translation

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.

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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?

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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

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Interesting. How did you see that? Is there some tool to watch into the string table?

Scummtr. In the FM towns version all text is duplicated and not cut up in pieces. Perhaps because you can store an entire multivolume encyclopedia on a single CD-ROM.
So I deduced that vice versa a few bytes were saved by piecing together parts into one sentence and to fit it onto two 5.25” floppies (or two sides of the game disk, more accurately)

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By the way, I’m finished with the Italian art :slight_smile:

The next step is… implementing the language change option.

I’d like to do something that sees which “Data/Translation_xx.tsv” files exist so it adds them to an array and the options cycle trough the different languages, but I don’t think there’s a script call that lists files that match a query string.

So by now I think I’ll add an array in TranslationHelper.dinky where you put the two-letter codes. So a translator needs to add the code to the array when they add their translation file.

The best would be detecting the user’s system language, but I’m quite sure this is something that needs to be done at engine level, not script level :stuck_out_tongue:

Elegant to set a default on startup sure, best no. :wink:

Unfortunately that requires DirectX 13

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The engine has the ability to detect system language, it’s just not enabled yet.

There is a Dinky function to list assets, but it’s never been tested, so it’s disabled. I’ll look at enabling that. I realized last night there is a problem labeling translation files with _en, _it, etc. The system will auto-load a different file if you try and load “_en” while the language is set to “it”. This wasn’t a problem in TWP because this was all done in C/C++ and I skipped the check. We need to name the .tsv files something different when ending with _en, _it.

May I suggest translation_it_zak ?

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It’s can be playabe as test ? what at % as been completed the italian translation ? It’s be already released as fan patch?

If you download the current version of the DeloresDev repository, the game is 100% in Italian but you have to modify Boot.dinky to add useTranslation(“it”) in place of the commented //useTranslation(“en”).

Otherwise:

Just wait for the official version :stuck_out_tongue:

it’s interested because on my case I redeemed the free purchase on gog.com

Hello friends… I have just tried the DEV version now… what i do for run it:

  1. Download as ZIP the GITHUB repo
  2. Download the DEV Engine (1.0.5)
  3. Extract both on a folder
  4. Edit the prefs.json and add the PATH and a line to set the “language: it”

Now the games start using the italia…

but the question it’s… how i can save ??
On first run i have take two photo (one to trashbin on fire and two at the director)… after that i have exit to go to sleep and and thinking that there was a autosave feature i lost everythings.

The actual dev as no save feature enabled ??