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Graf Zahl

GZDoom localization project

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Work has been underway to add full localization for various languages in GZDoom. Currently, German, French and Spanish are complete and Russian is almost complete.

Languages currently worked on are Italian (60% complete), Brazilian Portuguese (50% complete) and Hungarian (25% complete)

 

If someone here is interested in filling in the blanks for the incomplete languages or interested in adding another one, please drop me a note.

 

More information can be found here: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=63737

 

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I'd like to help with Romanian translations, but I'm at a loss on how to find proper translations for the  monster names and slang used in the storylines. But piecewise on the technical stuff I can help. Send me the text you want translated, perhaps along with some context. 

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All the text can be found in the link above, it's two Google sheets. But I might warn you right away, it's quite a bit, especially all of Strife's dialogues.

Concerning the slang, the best approach would be not to translate it literally but just try to get the tone right. I did the same for most German texts, a few are actually quite different from the original because tone was more important than content.

 

For Romanian we may need a few additional characters, though. 3 of the special characters have not been made yet because none of the other languages in the works needs them.

 

So, is there any chance Eternity wlll eventually get some localization as well? I guess a large part of the texts can be recycled.

Or would it be too much work to make it UTF-8 capable?

 

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8 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

For Romanian we may need a few additional characters, though. 3 of the special characters have not been made yet because none of the other languages in the works needs them.

 

Do you use unicode to represent any character? Or would it be too much work to add any set outside the western set?

 

8 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

So, is there any chance Eternity wlll eventually get some localization as well?

Haven't looked into it, and when time comes, we'll decide how to do it then.

 

I'm just interested about helping with this stuff in GZDoom, translation is fun, it may be too hard for me in the end, maybe it will be good to keep it open source and easy to find, so others can make amendments.

 

I'm still unable to translate words like archvile, when speaking of them we're just calling them with the same name. We're really anglophile most of the time and really sensitive to awkward Romanian translations, so it will be challenging... 

Edited by printz

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30 minutes ago, printz said:

Do you use unicode to represent any character? Or would it be too much work to add any set outside the western set?

 

One of the major parts of the localization work was to make the engine UTF-8 capable throughout.
Of course for backwards compatibility it still needs to be able to interpret ISO-8559-1 (or to be precise, Windows 1252) correctly if some byte sequence does not evaluate to proper UTF-8.

But all localization is stored as UTF-8 and decoded by the text printing function.

 

Another part was to extend the fonts by the most important Latin and Cyrillic characters. But since Romanian was not on the list of languages to be worked on, the ă, ș and ț don't exist yet, but I'm sure that the guy who made the others won't take long to add these as well.

 

 

30 minutes ago, printz said:

I'm just interested about helping with this stuff in GZDoom, translation is fun, it may be too hard for me in the end, maybe it will be good to keep it open source and easy to find, so others can make amendments.

 

 

That's why I put it on Google Docs so that people who are interested to contribute can request access and edit it.

 

30 minutes ago, printz said:

 

I'm still unable to translate words like archvile, when speaking of them we're just calling them with the same name. We're really anglophile most of the time and really sensitive to awkward Romanian translations, so it will be challenging... 

 

The Arch-Vile is definitely tricky. I had to think a lot how to find a German word for it. Ultimately I chose something that roughly translates to "very unpleasant person", maybe that gives you an idea what to choose, I guess you have words for such people in Romanian as well.

Especially with technical terms I'd suggest to take a very conservative approach. With stuff like this you often have to be very careful or you get Microsoftian horror translations where often you first have to translate it back to English before understanding what the hell they are trying to say...

 

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15 hours ago, printz said:

I'd like to help with Romanian translations, but I'm at a loss on how to find proper translations for the  monster names and slang used in the storylines. But piecewise on the technical stuff I can help. Send me the text you want translated, perhaps along with some context. 

 

My 2 cents on the topic of translating monster names: Would it hurt to just leave them the way they are in English? 

 

You could do something with "Baron of Hell" for instance, but others like "Arch-Vile"? Doubt any translation will do justice.

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I generally concur, but it's also something completely impenetrable for foreigners to make sense of that term. In German it is a word that totally feels out of place and I have no idea how to approximate it without sounding supremely stupid.

 

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Would it be possible to do both? To give monsters translated names but also give player the option to use original english names?

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With a bit of trickery that could be done, let's say you define a new language 'dex' and change the monster names back to English for that. Although it uses common language IDs the system never validates them so having such a made-up language would do precisely that. In the German text, for example, the Arch-Vile is the only one which might be considered a real problem.

 

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1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

I generally concur, but it's also something completely impenetrable for foreigners to make sense of that term. In German it is a word that totally feels out of place and I have no idea how to approximate it without sounding supremely stupid.

 

That's what I'm saying.

 

I'm not seeing any suitable Romanian translation for "Arch-Vile" and, to a somewhat lesser degree, "Pain Elemental". Both will most likely end up sounding monumentally stupid.

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@seed I'm no linguist, but for something like Arch-Vile, is it worth just going back to the original ancient greek and kind of side-translating from there?

 

"Arch" is from the Ancient Greek "arkhi" and the Latin "archi" meaning "chief, highest, most extreme". "Vile" is from the Latin "vilis" meaning "low, base, cheap".

 

So the name is kind of a pun, essentially meaning "the greatest low". 

 

Having a quick look at Google translate for Romanian, "arkhi" seems to have roughly derived to "ahr" (as in arhanghel). Wikictionary seems to imply "vilis" derived to "vil" in Romanian, but I can find no evidence of that actually being a word in use.  If it does make sense, then "Ahr-Vil" would be the closest approximation.  But if it doesn't, then Google Translate suggests "josnic" has the closest definition to the meaning of "Vile" in English, so it could be "Ahr-Josnic".

 

Granted I don't speak Romanian so that could sound laughably bad, but that's probably a decent approximation of what id were originally going for.

Edited by Bauul

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I like that idea, sounds like it can bring even more non english speakers into doom. Not sure how much czech users play gzdoom but i can help with czech translation i think.

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If you have a Google account, either open a request for editing on the two sheets or send me your mail address via PM.

 

If you don't have one you can still download the files, edit them locally and send them back to me regularly so I can add the content myself.

 

For Czech the same applies as for Romanian: Most of the fonts do not have Eastern European support yet, so if you test your texts in the engine those characters will fall back on the base versions without accent.

 

And generally, there's no rush. What's not ready for the next release will simply go into the next one.

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@Bauul it's arh, not ahr, as in the 'arkh' pronunciation without the unnecessary k :) 

 

Personally I always saw archviles as the noblest of demons in Doom. I consider the 'vile' term just a hellish perversion, Addams-family delightful self-deprecation word because they're the enemy and opposite in everything. I also find it more related to 'evil' or 'satanic' in this context. Thus I'd go with a good/bad dual word similar to 'terrible' rather than something conveying disgusting cowardly low life (they're not). 

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1 hour ago, printz said:

@Bauul it's arh, not ahr, as in the 'arkh' pronunciation without the unnecessary k :) 

 

Personally I always saw archviles as the noblest of demons in Doom. I consider the 'vile' term just a hellish perversion, Addams-family delightful self-deprecation word because they're the enemy and opposite in everything. I also find it more related to 'evil' or 'satanic' in this context. Thus I'd go with a good/bad dual word similar to 'terrible' rather than something conveying disgusting cowardly low life (they're not). 

 

Well, Vile, so I agree here.

 

Definitely not something that should imply abasement.

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3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

If you have a Google account, either open a request for editing on the two sheets or send me your mail address via PM.

 

If you don't have one you can still download the files, edit them locally and send them back to me regularly so I can add the content myself.

Okay i'l send you request for editing.

 

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

For Czech the same applies as for Romanian: Most of the fonts do not have Eastern European support yet, so if you test your texts in the engine those characters will fall back on the base versions without accent.

Yeah i'm aware of the font issue but i dont think that will be big issue i believe. Stuff like ř or č can be easily replaced with r and c, this is pretty common here with local translation of some game or other stuff.

Edited by Marlamir

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2 hours ago, printz said:

Thus I'd go with a good/bad dual word similar to 'terrible' rather than something conveying disgusting cowardly low life (they're not). 

 

Except that's exactly what "vile" means. "Terrible" isn't a good synonym for "vile" because it misses the sense of disgust and repulsion, which are pretty crucial to the meaning of the word.

 

While you might personally feel the word doesn't suite the monster, that's kind of besides the point. A good translation shouldn't factor in your own personal opinions. 

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2 hours ago, Bauul said:

While you might personally feel the word doesn't suite the monster, that's kind of besides the point. A good translation shouldn't factor in your own personal opinions. 

A good translation doesn't factor in the translator's personal opinions. It's literally straight as an arrow.

 

A good localization, on the other hand, well... that's kind of the difference between translation and localization.

 

Here's a good example, using the North American localization for Danganronpa V3. Take the original line:

 

Quote

湿っぽい事言わんとタイガースの応援や!

巨人を駆逐や! 駆逐したるで!

...which translates to...

Quote

Stop being so gloomy and cheer on the Tigers!

Destroy the Giants! We’re going to destroy them!

...except that this is a reference to two Japanese baseball teams, the Yomiuri Giants and the Hanshin Tigers.

 

Great if you follow Japanese baseball or know the teams! Confusing if you don't.

 

A translation, thus, ends there. A localization, on the other hand, gets the meaning across even if it changes the actual dialogue.

 

And hence, that same line became this in the English version:

 

x15fs4hdcorekn7lmdpk.jpg

 

That's localization.

 

By using two teams most Americans would know quite well - the NFL's New England Patriots and New York Jets - the joke is carried across, as is the feeling, even though the translation is completely wrong.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if the European version, for example, used a similar device via, say, football teams or something, rather than a literal translation.

Edited by Dark Pulse

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6 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

A good translation doesn't factor in the translator's personal opinions. It's literally straight as an arrow.

 

A good localization, on the other hand, well... that's kind of the difference between translation and localization.

 

By using two teams most Americans would know quite well - the NFL's New England Patriots and New York Jets - the joke is carried across, as is the feeling, even though the translation is completely wrong.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if the European version, for example, used a similar device via, say, football teams or something, rather than a literal translation.

 

Absolutely correct. Unfortunately very few translators get this right - an experience I frequently made when developing mobile games. It is absolutely secondary to do a literal translation.

 

One example from the German texts I did is the following:

 

One of Strife's messages for a cheat is

"You got the Midas Touch, baby"

The problem is, if I tried to translate that to German, chances are that nobody will understand what it means, so the German text is:

"Dagobert Duck lässt grüßen!" (in English: "Greetings from Scrooge McDuck!")

Now everybody knows it's about gold.

 

So, the clear advice is, if you have problems with a text, just try to convey its meaning - even if the context needs to change a bit.

 

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Just a little reminder that we are still looking for help. While the most important Western languages - German, French, Spanish and Portuguese - plus Russian and Korean - are mostly complete, it doesn't look this good for Eastern Europe.

Currently active languages that still need work are Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian and to a lesser extent Italian. They are being worked on, but it's going very slowly, so if there were more contributors it could certainly help. In addition to these someone just started a Finnish translation as well, so if the work here could be split it would also be nice.

 

If anyone is interested in helping with these languages, please head over to the ZDoom thread linked in the first post.

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@Graf Zahl I had no idea that FPSes were big in South Korea. I've usually assumed a super-majority of Korean gamers were huge Starcraft fans and anything else RTS-related.  Since there's a whole group of Japanese Doom players, I'm also kinda surprised there's no Japanese support yet, granted that's gonna be a pain in the ass, given you'd have to support Hiragana, Katakana, and Chinese Characters / Kanji.

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All the CJK stuff is handled by a Unicode font. This way nobody needs to draw all the thousands of ideograms required in all the various bitmap font styles.

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8 hours ago, Master O said:

@Graf Zahl I had no idea that FPSes were big in South Korea. I've usually assumed a super-majority of Korean gamers were huge Starcraft fans and anything else RTS-related. 

 

All you really need is a few dedicated persons to translate the text and some means to display it.

The Korean translation was originally a side project that apparently started before I added the localization features and aimed at replacing the font as well - but after I added a full Unicode font I also made the changes to use it in all the places where text gets drawn if the language is not alphabet-based.

 

 

 

8 hours ago, Master O said:

 

 

Since there's a whole group of Japanese Doom players, I'm also kinda surprised there's no Japanese support yet, granted that's gonna be a pain in the ass, given you'd have to support Hiragana, Katakana, and Chinese Characters / Kanji.

 

There is a Japanese translation in the works but it's a) not complete yet and b) I haven't been able to get in contact with the people making it. So I don't know if they are ok with appropriating their work for internal use - but I don't really see why it should not be doable.

Since the font is already complete it'll also be able to display Japanese and Chinese.

 

The only thing that doesn't work is text input in such languages. I do not have the knowledge to implement it so unless someone else contributes such a thing for the few places where users can enter text that may be visible to others (i.e. the chat, console and savegame names), those Asian users will have to use Latin workarounds.

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Copied from the thread in the ZDoom forums:

 

Unfortunately the translations for the Eastern European languages have more or less stalled and some other are also moving slowly.

Currently unfinished languages are:

Czech (no significant work in recent weeks)
Greek (just started a few days ago with a single contributor)
Esperanto (started three weeks ago with a single contributor)
Finnish (started three weeks ago with a single contributor)
Hungarian (no significant work in recent weeks)
Italian (Menu texts complete, but a lot of game content is still missing, no significant work in recent weeks)
Polish (no significant work in recent weeks)
Romanian (no significant work in recent weeks)
Serbian (only an incomplete initial submission with no work done afterward)

 

Any of these languages could use some help. Help does not mean you have to do some extended work spanning days and weeks. Even if you just submitted single translations for empty fields here in this thread it'd reduce the remaining amount of work. Any contribution, however minor, is appreciated.

 

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12 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Romanian (no significant work in recent weeks)

We're also highly used to English and sensitive to awkward translations. Often, whenever I come back, I tend to revise my own translations. I'd be afraid if it were complete and you put the first version you saw.

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I know that problem. I've done localization management for many work projects over the years and it's constantly recurring. Sometimes it even resulted in multiple revisions from professional translators - which on small screen mobile devices where a lot had to be formatted by hand could be very, very annoying and time consuming. (Fortunately that's not a big issue here - the only texts that need manual formatting are the intermission texts.

 

But in the end, a complete but somewhat awkward translation has the chance of getting reviewed by other users so that over the time the problems can be ironed out.

So, it's clearly preferable to translate missing texts than revise existing translations, unless they are clearly broken.

 

I guess that most Europeans still use English, considering the near total absence of text related bug reports for the finished languages.

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I don't know how much people except me do working on the czech translation but from my side because of various irl shit that happening to me i will not be able to do anything for few months :/ Still wish you big luck Graf with that project, is not very common to have source ports with so many translations.

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Just noticed this thread here on Doomworld.

 

On 5/15/2019 at 11:51 PM, Marlamir said:

Still wish you big luck Graf with that project, is not very common to have source ports with so many translations. 

You’re right about that. Several years ago when I was just getting into Doom, I never imagined that GZDoom would start featuring so many additional languages.

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I was actually surprised how many languages we managed to complete. I would have expected to get Spanish, French and German, but it has become a lot more.

 

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