Hi all,
I love the "make translation source" button, but is there a way to output all the dialog/text and include the character names? Right now I have a list of all the dialog, but it doesn't tell me which character says the line. :( An italian company is translating the game for me, and going to record italian voice speech as well, so this would be useful.
This sounds like a reasonable request to me.
The "Auto-number speech lines" feature already does this in the generated SPEECHREF.TXT file. Did you use auto-number speech lines, or did you manually number them? However, I can see that for a translation this wouldn't necessarily be particularly useful.
The autonumber function doesn't include modules, and I can't use it because it will renumber all of the current speech. :(
The problem with the translation source is that identical lines are combined -- so if you had two different characters that both said "Hello", you'd only get one "Hello" entry in the translation file. Interesting problem.
Yes, that is an interesting problem, because although two lines may be identical in English, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're identical in other languages. Most notably, in many languages you'd have to use different forms depending on who you address (male/female, familiar/formal, etc.) Even worse for translation purposes, many languages have noun classes (grammatical gender) that carry over into pronouns, so that you can't just have a generic "I can't pick that up" phrase, you have to say "I can't pick him/her/it up" (loosely approximated), depending on whether the word is masculine, feminine or neuter.
Just replacing strings may ultimately not be sufficient. New lines may need to be written and incorporated into the game.
Having worked with localization professionally, I can only agree with Snarky that forcing identical translations for identical Strings is very risky. Is this only true for dialogs or for all Strings in the game? If the text-substitution for translations is done purely by String-comparing the original text with the translation source, I'd suggest that - somwhere down the line - the system be entirely rewritten with unique String IDs for every original String.
Sorry to dig up an old thread like that, but I am working on a translation file at the moment that has been compiled with the latest version of AGS (At least I guess) and still this issue doesn't seem to be solved - has it been adressed in the meantime?
I'll ask for the SPEECHREF.TXT, but it would be really convenient to have it all at hand in one file.
edit: Okay, it's quite alright working with the speechref.txt, although it would be very nice to have one file, maybe even including room numbers or other additional information, when translating.
This request is still outstanding, thanks for your input and interest in it.
If it found its way into one of the next releases, internationalization - which is already one of the strengths of AGS - could become such an easy task; people who want to have a game translated for a wider audience wouldn't even have to look for someone who possesses basic knowledge of scripting or of adventure game mechanics in general, you could translate it just like a screenplay.
Maybe you'll find time for this somewhere along the way. Thanks for your response!