Introduction
For years we have plenty of mods in different languages, most prominent languages are German, Polish and Russian. And a lot of these mods are only available in one of these languages as translating the mods is difficult and time consuming, especially for huge mods.
Spine therefore added a translation tool which is supposed to make the whole translation process a lot easier.
Overview
The general idea is to avoid manual sharing of scripts to translate a mod and instead even share translations across multiple mods, which works best for enhancement mods, but also total conversion can profit from it.
Each name, text and dialog in a mod has just to be translated once. When it is translated for modification A, modification B, C, D… will use the same translation. This will save a lot of time already when resuing e.g. SVMs, same monsters, items, spells…
Requesting a translation
If you developed a mod and want to translate it, that’s not that hard. In the Spine client, click on Developer in the menu bar and then on Request translation. A new dialog will appear. Here you can select the path to your scripts folder. This is the top most scripts folder (_work/data/Scripts). Then you need to give this project a name (e.g. the name of the mod) and select the source and destination language. Source language is the language the scripts are written in, destination the language you want to translate to. After doing so you can directly parse the scripts. This will take a while, but after it completed you see the stats for the project, that means how many texts it contains. Now just click on Request translation and it will upload your texts to the server and create a new translation project.
Managing your translation
Now you created a translation request, but nobody can translate. In the same dialog you will see an overview over your translation projects (update might take a while). Each of them will show the progress and two buttons, one to manage the users allowed to translate, one to apply the translation. We will come the applying later.
In order to let people translate your project, you need to add them in the user management. Just select somebody on the left side, click the arrow and add them to the right side. Each user on the right side can access the translation of the project. To remove someone again, just move the user out of the right list back into the left one.
Applying a translation
When a translation is done or even inbetween, you can apply the translation to your scripts. This also works when you changed the scripts between requesting the translation and applying it, but of course won’t affect changed texts.
When applying a translation, select the same folder as for requesting the translation. This will also take a while and afterwards you get a new folder above the scripts folder called translated. Now you just need to compile this folder, rebuild subtitles and you have a translation of your scripts.
NOTE: Texts that haven’t been translated yet when applying the translation are filled up with automatically translated texts using DeepL. That’s not as good as a manual translation, but is better than no translation. Be aware of that new texts also have to be translated first with DeepL, so you can’t directly apply a translation after requesting it and have the texts auto-translated already.
Translating a modification
Translation can be done by everybody with access to the translation project, so by developers and players. First you need to open the Translator via Developer => Translator. On the top left is a dropdown with all translation projects. This contains those you’re not unlocked for. Selecting one will show the overall progress of finished texts on the right side.
Then you have to options:
- Request text to translate
- Request text to review
The whole translation process is split into two steps. First every text has to be translated from the source to the destination language. Therefore you get hints from similar translated texts and the automated translation if available. You then can translate the text and aubmit it.
The other part is the review process. Every translated text has to be reviewed by another user as quality control. If the text is correct, the reviewer can submit it and the overall count of the translation will increase. If the reviewer changes something, it will be tagged for review again.
How to help?
If you want to help with translating mods, contact us in the thread @ World of Gothic used for the translations.