Translation Suite Instructions

[res7less]

That sure might be a bit late since the game is almost complete and translated into several languages, but everyone is looking forward towards Secrets of Grindea 2, eh? So here are a few suggestions to improve the translation tool:

Search function for words

It's quite often the case when one remembers a past dialogue when processing some new information, that one wishes to quickly find the one dialogue with the word, that needs to be changed. Simply typing a word, or a pair of words to find all the LocalIDs that contain those, would be very helpful. It's also nice when things are being changed afterwards, like names of people or locations. Yes, they can manually be marked for translation, but I remember when Farmahmera was renamed, there was one sentence that wasn't marked. Such mistakes can be worked around with a search function.

Clicking on "New" conditional adds a key

That's just something to increase translation speed. Clicking on "New" should automatically fill the key line with [#], starting at zero. Having sentences that have multiple keys, or having multiple sentences with at least one key is currently pretty annoying. Clicking on "New" every time and manually adding [0] or whichever can become repetitive. They can still be modified manually, if one wishes to use something fancy.

Being able to copy to clipboard from dialogue window

When placing sentences which contain many keys, depending on complexity, into Google Translate (or other software) for spell check reasons, the translated result becomes unintelligible. Having a button to copy the current text, where the keys are already replaced by text fragments would be very helpful.

Don't make " " start new sentences

When missing direct translations, sometimes one simple word has to be worked around, using multiple long words. If that happens to be the case multiple times in one sentence, combined with a font, using wide letters, the available space for the translation may run out in no time. Having words that end with " " be taken into the next sentence is a waste of valuable space and may be worked around by pressing "enter". That may work out in some cases, but when the sentence contains keys, the length of which may differ, that solution doesn't work and the only thing that would help is that the tool recognizes lines that end with " " and allows them to exist beyond the border, thus leaving the word before the " " in the same sentence.

Otherwise I still love that Translation Tool

 

[Teddy]

That's just something to increase translation speed. Clicking on "New" should automatically fill the key line with [#], starting at zero.

Man, that's a great idea. I should add this to the tool I use to write the dialogues as well

By the way, there's something I need to double check with you regarding the translation tool... I think you've said before that the conditionals aren't enough because in Russian it's important, for example, if Player 2 is male or female?

Would an option to combine conditionals work for all such cases? Like if you can have a condition that's "2+ players and everyone is male". If the current conditions doesn't work even when combined, what new conditions would be needed to be able to make a proper translation?

 

[res7less]

Man, that's a great idea. I should add this to the tool I use to write the dialogues as well

Heh, glad you like it. If you want to make it even more fancy, you could automatically add the newly created key to the current position of the cursor in the base text, before the view switches to the key's page.

Would an option to combine conditionals work for all such cases? Like if you can have a condition that's "2+ players and everyone is male". If the current conditions doesn't work even when combined, what new conditions would be needed to be able to make a proper translation?

Ideally one would need to know the gender of every player, but I think that would be an overkill. I don't know if there are certain cases I didn't have in other languages, but for me the main problem was when there are exactly 2 players and an NPC speaks to one player, referring to the other (for example "Call your friend."). In usual dialogues the case is rare to nonexistant, but almost every gather-players-dialogue has this issue.

The workaround (without knowing a certain player's gender) by combining conditionals would be to be able to set AND("2 players", "All Female") or AND("2 players", "All Male") or AND("2 players", "Mixed", "Local Char Boy") or AND("2 players", "Mixed", "Local Char Girl"). So basically one would need "Mixed" as a conditional because "Otherwise" won't work (or it would, but might quickly become too complicated) when used while chaining conditionals. But that's just what I was thinking in the direction of a modular system, I'm sure there might be an easier individual approach to a solution.

I think trying to create a system which is so modular that it can be used to translate in every language is neither possible, nor necessary. Every language has its little exceptions and rare issues, which can can be individually addressed one by one, in case such are voiced by the respective native speakers.

 

[Brom]

I don't know if there are certain cases I didn't have in other languages, but for me the main problem was when there are exactly 2 players and an NPC speaks to one player, referring to the other (for example "Call your friend."). In usual dialogues the case is rare to nonexistant, but almost every gather-players-dialogue has this issue.

This would be an issue in Italian as well, but I usually circumvent it by changing the dialogue slightly to something like "we should all be here before talking to him/her" (if it's Bag talking) or "I'm not going to repeat myself, make sure everyone is here"; you get the gist. Saves me an headache.

 

[KoBeWi]

Not sure where to post this XD

 

[res7less]

And here I go suffering from severe cringe poisoning due to my own line 3 years ago. Man, that sure didn't age well. Apologies.

That sure might be a bit late since the game is almost complete and translated into several languages, but everyone is looking forward towards Secrets of Grindea 2, eh?

Anyways, I just encountered the weirdest thing in the dialogue translation tool. For some unfathomable reason, I can't color Inspect_CaptainJournal_Pt01 (and similar lines) yellow. It works with purple, it works with red, it works with teal, but screw yellow? As soon as I hit "save", it immediately resets to default color. It works if the first line isn't empty, but this way I can't mimic how it looks in the original.

Apparently, it does have something to do with cyrillic since, if I go to fetch line, I can save and it stays yellow. But if I replace just the first letter with a cyrillic letter, saving resets the color. Even more interesting: If I color everything in red and just the first letter(s) in yellow, only the yellow part of the text resets. That is some serious Illuminati stuff!

Here are some random cyrillic letters for testing purposes: Ш Д Ё П Ж

Edit: I found a workaround: if you select the empty first line, even though it contains no symbols, and color it red, teal or purple, the second line stays yellow when saving. Amazing!