Translators (all languages but French) requested/needed

[GalakStarscraper]

Thanks Methusalah, but I had a German BB fanatic volunteer this morning, and I'd rather have BB players do the translations since it makes more sense to them as to the intent of the skill.

So recapping for me more than anyone so when I get this done I have a reference list:

Languages volunteered for:
Danish (Harleqin)
Dutch (Ronald Lokers or Remco)
Finnish (norev)
French (Dain)
German (Thomas Fritz from the MBBL2)
Hungarian (Black Orc from RPU-Hu)
Japanese (Marcus)
Portugese (Joaquim)
Spanish (Manusate)
Swedish (Thradin)

I'd still like to get Italian if possible ...

Thanks guys.

Galak

[Marcus]

caveat on the japanese version. My kana is crap, if you want it in romanji (western script) I can help but I'll need to bring in help for japanese script

[Ancalagon]

I can help on spanish translation too...

[GalakStarscraper]

Galak, why will the different language versions be incompatible for gameplay? If you perform i18n corrently, there should be no conflicts between the different language versions. I.E. a Spanish player should be able to play a Japanese player, since all of the text differs only in the string table.

The problem as I see it comes from two sources 1 minor/1 very major.

The minor one is that in PBeM you really do often need to type comments to your opponent. I'm not going to be translating this so that means the players would need to share a common language to begin with in order to play ... if they have a common language they should probably both be playing the game in that language anyway.

The very major one is that part of the translation process will be that the HTML rosters will be in the native tongue so its a matter of how much effort I want to do here.

A) If I don't have two languages then all I need a single loaded string file that changes the programs IF statements to test for Châtaigne instead of Mighty Blow on the HTML roster. Pretty basic changes to the program as I don't need to actually translate the HTML at all. I'm just changing the program to be able to read the new HTML file.

B) If I have two languages, I have two problems. Problem 1 I might be able to get around which is getting the computer to know that when it looks a player A's HTML to do Spanish text testing and when it does player B to use French. However Problem 2: if I don't speak Spanish then I also need to ACTUALLY DO translation work in the program. I'll need to take the Spanish HTML file and translate it to French so that the French player has a clue what skills the Spanish player has.

Now in my mind I think I know how to do B, but its a REALLY BIG AMOUNT of work since it requires translation coding and version A does not. Also very little of A would be lost if later it was upgraded to a B type version later.

At the end of the day, remember I am a manager level programmer doing this on my free time. While I mentally appreciate the laudable goal of the PBeM being able to have a Japanese player with his Japanese HTML play against one of the RPG-Hu players in Hungarian with his Hungarian HTML, I hope the above highlights the fact that doing so increases the time and complexity of this project by a factor of 4x.

I'm not ruling it out Mr. Sanity, but let me do the easy things first and make it so players in the FranceBloodBowl league can play each other in French. After that I can start to think about what all would be required to make Blood Bowl PBeM a truely universal program.

It would be unfortunate if making the tool multi-lingual ended up dividing the playing communites by language, or force multilingual players to have to constantly update multiple versions of the tool upon each new release. If you could explain the reason for breaking compatibility between the languages, I would be glad to try to help you and Ronald come up with a solution.

First let me just add one comment here ... the PBeM tool would not end up dividing the playing communties by language unless they already are divided by language. IE nothing about the tool can CREATE language barriers ... they would kinda of have to have already been there.

Second, let me address the "constantly update multiple version of the tool" comment. I think you greatly misunderstand what I'm doing here. There will NOT be multiple versions of the program. There will still only be the one PBeM tool. There will be a new line in the pbembb.ini that says LanguageFile=pbembb_??????.ini where ?? is the name of the language that should be used to play.
There will then be a series of files like pbembb_French.ini, pbembb_Spanish.ini, etc. there as well (these are the files the nice folks of TalkBB are volunteering to create). The program will load the language ini and as it starts its will internally reset all the text, popups, and IF statements to the translation values set in the ini.

So when the tool gets upgraded there will still only be one version. The translation files may need updated now and then with a new additional translations, but that's to be expected.

Does this all help explain what I'm working on and the issues involved?

Galak

[GalakStarscraper]

caveat on the japanese version. My kana is crap, if you want it in romanji (western script) I can help but I'll need to bring in help for japanese script

The romanji will be fine. Thanks, Marcus.

Galak

[Thadrin]

Danish and Norwegian are just misspelt swedish. :p

The one time I went to Belgium I was in either Antwerp or Ostend (don't remember - we were based in Bruges, and they had this beer called a tripel...so alcoholic it would probably kill Marcus if he so much as looked at it.) and we were told NOT to speak french because it would actually annoy the locals. Not that my French is any good anyway, as I amply proved on my Honeymoon in Paris. We were told to stick to English seeing as there wasn't one of us who knew the first bit of Flemish.

Dutch is surprisingly like Swedish you know. During the T5 tourney I could understand a decent percentage of the local written stuff because it was almost like a hybrid of English and Swedish with some German thrown in. Didn't have a hope of understanding the spoken though.

Swedes speak nearly perfect English for the most part...anyone under the age of about 50 anyway. Unlike in France and Germany the TV shows aren't dubbed, so they grow up with it. Explains why Swedes often sound American when speaking English.

And I now have the image of Scottish BloodBowl in my head now thanks to Deathwing...Orcs in Green and white hoops against Humans in Blue...what an image...you could invent new cards: "see you Jimmy", "Did you spill my pint?", "d'you eat ma deep fried Mars bar?", "Actually I prefer Partick Thistle", "Aberdeen? is that no where they're a wee bit tae fond of the sheep?" etc etc

[zande]

I can do the italian version, if needed... I can speak well italian, less english but here is a matter of reading, or not?

[GalakStarscraper]

I can do the italian version, if needed... I can speak well italian, less english but here is a matter of reading, or not?

Thanks, zande.

Galak

[Methusalah]

Thanks Methusalah, but I had a German BB fanatic volunteer this morning, and I'd rather have BB players do the translations since it makes more sense to them as to the intent of the skill.

Understand completely Galak, glad you've got it covered.
LOL Thadrin, what about "I dinna ken what you're talkin' aboot" or the more generic "see you pal".

[Thadrin]

"You startin' pal?"..."c'mon then"...."quit ya greetin' and play ball, ya great wain."
I think you really have to have lived there...
heh...Rab C. Oberwald.....

Who fancies doing the Scouse version?

[Remco]

Norev, not éverybody in Holland speaks/writes fluent English, but a fair percentage do. The problem is that with Internet everything has to be typed as quickly as possible. That probably accounts for most of the spelling mistakes people make on forums, and even more in chatrooms.

[GalakStarscraper]

Just to let you guys know Ronald and I have started working together on the 3.0 version.

This is very cool ... its been months since Ronald has seriously written new code of the program as I've kinda taken over the reigns to the program as Ronald went to pursue other interests. However, this project really has his attention ... so forward we go.

The side effect of Ronald's interest is that we are going all the way. We are going to make it so that a Hungarian player with his HTML roster in Hungarian can play an Italian player with his HTML roster in Italian and have the game automatically translate everything but typed comments by the coaches into each other's language as they play.

Its a major undertaking, but one we are looking forward to working on.

Galak

[Deathwing]

Your dedication never ceases to amaze me! Kudos!
Slightly off topic, but if you or Chet could find the time to address the Basic Guide sticky it'd be cool. Just to keep it up to date for noobs. Just mailed it to somebody and had to add an amendum to ignore a lot of the 'handling kick-offs manually' instructions. Not a major problem, it'd just be nice to keep it in step with the tool development.

[GalakStarscraper]

I think I got most of it fixed ... let me know if I missed something DW.

Galak

[Moonsong]

If Zande needs help with italian, here I am...

Moonsong