[Community Effort] French, Italian, German and Spanish translation

Leoreth

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I would like to start another initiative where people can contribute to the mod. So far, I have not invested much work into translating the mod into the other four EFIGS languages supported by the international release of Civ4. That is on one hand because I do not (sufficiently) speak French, Italian or Spanish to do so, and even for German have not always found the time when compared to other things I could invest my time into.

On the other hand, it is relatively easy to do if you speak one of these languages and are willing to invest the time. Over the last month contributions on git have shown that we could start this effort without the need for much assistance from my end.

So what is the plan? For each language, I would like to assemble a team that includes the following skills:
- fluent grasp of the language
- sufficient skills in git to create pull requests against the mod
- ability to edit Civ4 game text in XML

or for the last two, the willingness to learn it (neither is very complicated). I would like to emphasise that it doesn't need to be a single person that has all of these skills! Even if you do not speak any of the languages in question, you can contribute by extracting the English text from the XML to have others translate it and putting it back into a pull request. Likewise, if you feel up to the task of translating text but not getting it into the game, you will still be able to contribute. I envision the actual translating work to take place in a shared medium like Google docs.

For each language, work will kick off once sufficient people have volunteered. Afterwards, I see three steps to the process:

1. Ensuring compatibility: currently, most English texts are not only not translated, but completely lack an entry for the other languages at all. This leads to errors, most notably to missing in the main menu, currently rendering the mod unplayable in any language but English. Even if the mod was technically playable, it would still lack texts for many units etc. rendering it functionally unplayable anyway. I think it is preferable to have English texts in some places for a localised version instead of it being completely broken with no text at all. Therefore, the first step is to add tags for the target language to all texts in the game lacking a translation with only the English text as content. Obviously, this step does not require knowledge in the target language.

2. Removing errors: some RFC texts already had translations, but then later on I changed the English text without updating the translations. These entries will not break the mod, but are still wrong and can lead to confusion. The goal of this step is to identify these errors and either replace them with English text like in step 1, or the correct translation if already possible. This step only requires moderate skills in the target language, and not necessarily fluency.

3. Adding translation: here is where the actual translation work comes in. All texts identified as in need of translation in steps 1 and 2 need to actually be translated and updated in the mod.

Now is the time to volunteer, if you are interested please let me know in this thread with your relevant skills.

List of volunteers:
- merijn_v1 (git, XML)
- Steb (French)
- Imp. Knoedel (German, XML, git)
- BasilBerylium (Spanish)
- Kipra (French)
- J422 (French)
- Sarius1997 (German, XML)
- Genghis Khaiser (Spanish)

(Pre-emptive) frequently asked questions:

What happens if text is added after this project is complete?
I promise to be a better citizen here and make sure to follow steps 1 and 2 whenever I add or update existing texts, and will always include a German translation from the start. For the other three languages, I will do my best to research trivial translations myself (e.g. civ names etc.), but when it comes to complete sentences I may need help from the original translator teams again, for example every time around a release.

What about Russian or Chinese?
I know that there are also Russian and Chinese DoC communities who mostly interact outside of CFC. Unfortunately, their translation uses a completely different base game that is not directly compatible with the EFIGS version and that I do not understand. I of course encourage them to update their existing translations as well, but I think it is best if they organise that within their own communities, since I don't think I can offer much support for them.
 
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I'm willing to participate. I do not speak any of these languages fluently for real translation, but I think well enough to being able to do the translation of steps 2. And I think it is clear I got all relevant modding skills.
 
Nice! I'll gladly help with the French translation. In fact I have thought about making a translation pull request myself, but there are other things that are more fun to mod. I can do all steps of the process, but I'd like to focus on the actual translation part.

Maybe after the translation is done I can show the mod to my mom who still plays unmodded BTS after all these years :)
 
I thought that this might open DoC to new audiences :D
 
Is there any way to add custom translations apart from the default ones. Also, what about encoding?
 
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Is there any way to add custom translations apart from the default ones. Also, what about encoding?
Not that I know, EFIGS is pretty much hardcoded in. An additional language is also much more of a challenge because you would also need to translate all text from the base game.

Civ4 supports the Windows Latin-1021 character set, which includes special characters for most Germanic and Romanic languages, and can be represented using HTML character codes.
 
I'm not into git and XML, but i could help you guys with translating Portuguese.
More specifically Brazilian Portuguese.
If any of you wants me to make a list of translations and then somebody else make the code and upload into git, i'm welcome to help.
 
German plus XML editing skill plus pull request ability here.
 
Hello there, just wanted to start by saying that I love this mod and I thank you all for all the effort you put in it, it's really great! And now I also have the opportunity to help! So I speak French and I could also help with step 2 of Italian. I don't know XML and vaguely remember doing a GIT tutorial but I could try and get into it. I'm quite exited about this because a lot of my friends are discouraged from playing this mod because it doesn't have a translation. They won't be able to refuse it now (especially if I help with the translation :goodjob:).
 
Would be happy to help with the french translation. I'm not big on technical stuff, but I've done my fair share of translating out of english. Setting up a framapad could be a good idea if there are enough persons.
 
German and XML skills here. Git pull requests probably aren't that complicated, so i can help.
 
I'm not into git and XML, but i could help you guys with translating Portuguese.
More specifically Brazilian Portuguese.
If any of you wants me to make a list of translations and then somebody else make the code and upload into git, i'm welcome to help.
Portuguese is unfortunately not supported, but thank you for the offer.

Thank you to all other volunteers too of course! Looks like we have enough for German and French at least, but let's wait a bit more to give everyone the chance to see this.
 
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Would be happy to help with the french translation. I'm not big on technical stuff, but I've done my fair share of translating out of english. Setting up a framapad could be a good idea if there are enough persons.
I haven't heard of framapad before, it seems to be a French language tool if I'm not mistaken (most search results are in French). I was planning to look into tools like that but if I do set it up an international tool is preferable so all translation projects can benefit from it.
 
You can change the language to english, but not everything is translated. It is pretty straightforward though, I don't think it would be a problem.

Titanpad is apparently an english language alternative, but it seems less polished and got an annoying "insecure connection" warning everytime you go on the website.
 
Portuguese is unfortunately not supported, but thank you for the offer.

Thank you to all other volunteers too of course! Looks like we have enough for German and French at least, but let's wait a bit more to give everyone the chance to see this.

Huh. Why though? I guess it's because portuguese uses some characters not supported by the game
Which BY THE WAY, @citis and @1SDAN, thats a problem on your guys's Italy. The "é" on VenÉta is broken.
 
No, it is because there is a fixed set of supported languages in the international release, which are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
 
I'm no programmer but Spanish is my native language, so if there's any text I can type or translate, I'm in.

I know of an issue that might make some noise among Spanish-language players: While English has "you" as a second person pronoun, the Spanish language has up to five (tú, usted, ustedes, vos, vosotros), and the translation always addresses the player with "vos" (roughly meaning "thou"). Do we do the "vos" pronoun (odd, but consistent with the rest of the official translation), or do we use "tú" (more casual, but inconsistent with the rest, might need to rewrite all text using the second person in order to make consistency)?
 
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I am in favour of anything that reduces the workload, because we should keep our goals achievable. In that light, I prefer consistency, but I cannot judge the tone this style of translation creates. Ultimately the Spanish language team needs to come to a conclusion there and stick to it.

Now that you mentioned that, we also should take care to avoid issues with regional dialects. I assume the existing translation is based on European French and Spanish (and obviously German and Italian but it's not much of an issue there), while I guess not all of you have this particular background.
 
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