Spanish Translation

[FoeOfTheBee]

I would like to translate Spring to Spanish. What are the plans for translation of Spring? Is there a special file for all text in the game?

[SJ]

All text is just hardcoded into the code (except some unit text that already has translation inside the fbi files, altough we dont use it), so writing a translation would be quite hard currently.

[FoeOfTheBee]

Maybe it would be worthwhile to move all text to one specific file. Translations could really increase the user base. I don't know enough code to know how difficult this would be.

[Dwarden]

Yes i support offloading text to standalone file(s) for easy translation ... and follow some of supported multilanguage formats (for certain laguage specific charsets etc) ...

[mongus]

I dont see inmediate need for a translation...
and i dont remember a spanish version of the original game.
However, maybe help in spanish is a good addition.
Im interested in making some sort of faq or newbie help in spanish.
PM me if you are interested.

[PauloMorfeo]

Maybe it would be worthwhile to move all text to one specific file. ...

Making the project from the start with that in mind is hard work. Making that after the project is advanced, is much harder than hard work.

I would be really nice to have that but ...

[Ace07]

Well, I can see what I can do about the Lobby. Hopefully I can get it to load stuff from text files so that you can translate it.

[Rheini]

Oh man, how can you hard-code it? What about all those people who can't speak English sufficiently?

[Tobi]

It's easier then implementing translation

Seriously tho, internationalizing the engine is an enormous job - one has to decide what translation system to use, ie. i18n, gettext, some custom stuff.

Also all user visible strings have to be in something better then 7 bit ASCII, ie. UTF-8 or UNICODE. And that's even before you can start translating...

[Rheini]

At the beginning of the project it'd have been a bit more work to have many supported languages now. That's a fair tradeoff, I think

[Pxtl]

Well, just moving the strings to an external ascii text file would be a start. I mean, ascii is all you need for the European languages. Unicode support is a much bigger jump.

[rattle]

XML *cough* :)
I could be tempted to translate it to german but that would mean translating every mod's unit/building descriptions too which is a lot of work.

[Rheini]

So if you hard coded the strings.. is the gui also "hard-coded"?
I mean things like what is shown where etc.

[Dragon45]

For now, yes.

Translating the whole engine would be an enormous job, but translating bits and pieces - not so much depending on what buts and pieces.

[Rheini]

I think a good GUI should be based on files describing where and how and so on everything is displayed. I think Steam is using something like that, isn't it? They use .rc files. Is something like that planned?
I know it's a lot of work. Theoretically you could do the translation piece by piece. You need kind of a "getlocalizedstring(id)" function and then one after another the hardcoded string could be replaced with the function call.

[j5mello]

if anything making some of the Wiki sections international would be easier and more beneficial. The wiki is (or at least should be) the starting point for all new people who want to play spring. Making that easier for non English speakers to read would be a giant leap foward that doesn' require a massive amount of code work.

Mod files ie descriptions can be done on a per mod basis. Just need someone to volunteer to do them. Same with the wiki.