Translation to other languages?

[smoelf]

Hi guys

Where can i find the "language" file for the game? I mean the name of the things like Resources, ships, commanders etc.

There is no separate language file. All of that is stored in the database for the main game.

[bothond]

Hi guys

Where can i find the "language" file for the game? I mean the name of the things like Resources, ships, commanders etc.   

There is no separate language file.   All of that is stored in the database for the main game. 

Oh thanks!

Im dumb about this, how and where can i change/modify this?

[Erik L]

Oh thanks!

Im dumb about this, how and where can i change/modify this?

That sort of discussion is not appropriate for these forums. That being said, Steve does approve some modifications to the game, but you would need to discuss that directly with him.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Hi guys

Where can i find the "language" file for the game? I mean the name of the things like Resources, ships, commanders etc.

Ship and commander names come from naming themes stored in the database.  It is easy to add your own themes.  All you need is an appropriately formatted text file and there are buttons under the Miscellaneous tab on the Tactical Map.

[Антон]

what about the translation, does steve even know about this idea? if so, how will he help us localize this game?

[Garfunkel]

He knows about it but it cannot be done due to how the game is coded. Best to learn English, you don't need to know that many words to be able to play Aurora.

[ProfiPRO100]

Is it really impossible to translate into Russian, I'm so upset! :'(
There has been a review of this game in the Russian segment for quite a long time, more than a few years ago.  Even among my friends, they admired this game, they wanted to play it, but due to problems in understanding English, and the fact that Russian youtubers talked about the author's unwillingness to translate the game, the players turned away from this game in tears and sadness.  On YouTube, one of the players translated the BD file into Russian, but this is only 5-10% of the text of the entire game.  The rest cannot be translated.  If only the game was available to Russian players, then this game would be known to more people.  I hope you, the author of this game, or someone will translate this game into our language sometime.

[Steve Walmsley]

My knowledge of Russian is extremely limited. I did learn to read Cyrillic and even had some lessons around 2012 (I think), but I've lost most of it. Even then, I wouldn't have had the skills to do an effective translation. Also, it would consume a lot of time to implement and maintain. As well as doing the translation, the same meaning in different languages can be very different in terms of character length so it would require checking all the UI for each window in each language and maintaining that as windows changed. Finally, if I did Russian, then it would lead to requests for French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc.. This is a just a hobby (and not my only hobby), so I would rather spend the limited time I have on adding new features.

I realise the lack of translated versions, or localized versions, will limit the number of players, but achieving a high player count is not my goal (or I would have created a simpler game). This is not a commercial undertaking for me, its just for fun. It would defeat the object of creating the game if my time working on it became a chore to implement and maintain features that I didn't use myself.

[ProfiPRO100]

My knowledge of Russian is extremely limited.  I did learn to read Cyrillic and even had some lessons around 2012 (I think), but I've lost most of it.  Even then, I wouldn't have had the skills to do an effective translation.  Also, it would consume a lot of time to implement and maintain.  As well as doing the translation, the same meaning in different languages can be very different in terms of character length so it would require checking all the UI for each window in each language and maintaining that as windows changed.  Finally, if I did Russian, then it would lead to requests for French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc. .  This is a just a hobby (and not my only hobby), so I would rather spend the limited time I have on adding new features.

I realise the lack of translated versions, or localized versions, will limit the number of players, but achieving a high player count is not my goal (or I would have created a simpler game).  This is not a commercial undertaking for me, its just for fun.  It would defeat the object of creating the game if my time working on it became a chore to implement and maintain features that I didn't use myself.

I am not a developer, I have never created games, I do not know how difficult it is to create them, especially if you create this game alone, but I am sure that it is very difficult, especially if you make this game as a hobby.  Do you ever plan to create a translation of this game into other languages, if so, when? I realized that your initial goal is to refine and make the game better, and probably leave the translation at the end.

At the moment, I'm looking for a "convenient translation" method to simplify the game process as much as possible.  As I wrote above, I don't understand programming, but I know most browser games using a browser-based automatic translator are easily translated, so maybe it's possible to transfer Aurora to a browser?

[Aloriel]

Speaking as a developer, the most common method used for translating games is where all translated text (including the original language) is stored in separate files in a localization folder and menu items, dialog, and all other words written on screen are all referenced by variable names. This is fairly simple to implement when you first make a game, but a serious chore when a game is fully developed such as with Aurora. These things really need to be part of the design scheme from the start.

To complicate matters further, Aurora uses a database file that contains most of its information. Much of this is also in English. I'm not 100% sure how to overcome this one.

For Steve to extract all of these bits of text into localization files, it would take an immense amount of time. If he started today, we might not see another Aurora version for a year or more... just to provide the ability to translate the text. And then, he'd need people to actually translate it to other languages. Also a huge undertaking.

My point is that I think Steve is well past the point of any of this being a simple matter. It's stuck as an English only game. Probably best to take it as is and use Google Translate to try to understand what the English phrases mean. Fortunately, most things are fairly straight forward and many others can be altered into your own language anyway (like commander names and ranks, and component and ship designs), at least, once you have figured out what they mean.

Just make sure to use . as your decimal separator or the game will crash. That is, unfortunately, not optional.

[ProfiPRO100]

Speaking as a developer, the most common method used for translating games is where all translated text (including the original language) is stored in separate files in a localization folder and menu items, dialog, and all other words written on screen are all referenced by variable names.  This is fairly simple to implement when you first make a game, but a serious chore when a game is fully developed such as with Aurora.  These things really need to be part of the design scheme from the start.

To complicate matters further, Aurora uses a database file that contains most of its information.  Much of this is also in English.  I'm not 100% sure how to overcome this one.

For Steve to extract all of these bits of text into localization files, it would take an immense amount of time.  If he started today, we might not see another Aurora version for a year or more. . .  just to provide the ability to translate the text.  And then, he'd need people to actually translate it to other languages.  Also a huge undertaking.

My point is that I think Steve is well past the point of any of this being a simple matter.  It's stuck as an English only game.  Probably best to take it as is and use Google Translate to try to understand what the English phrases mean.  Fortunately, most things are fairly straight forward and many others can be altered into your own language anyway (like commander names and ranks, and component and ship designs), at least, once you have figured out what they mean.

Just make sure to use .  as your decimal separator or the game will crash.  That is, unfortunately, not optional.

Yes, I can use various translators to highlight a certain area of the screen and translate them almost instantly, but it's terribly inconvenient, it's incredibly difficult, it's very difficult to translate a word or phrase and at the same time analyzing it, navigate through the tabs and enjoy the game.  Now, if there were a translator in the likeness of a "photo translator" to highlight, for example, the entire area of the screen and in real time the translated text was replaced by the language I needed and the same font size and color.  Unfortunately, there is no such translator, an ordinary translator for highlighting a small static area is not suitable.  Therefore, I asked above about transferring the Aurora game to the browser, then the text of the game was able to translate text into any language automatically and instantly using the built-in extension.  But I do not know if it is possible to do this, or would it be easier or faster to do it in comparison with a separate manual translation of the game?

[ProfiPRO100]

It is a pity that you are not going to translate the game, I and many thousands of players regret it "(

Is there really no other way to easily translate the game? For example, as far as I know, you have moved some files outside the core of the program to a database file.  This file, where possible, was translated into Russian, but it is only about 10-15% of the entire text of the game.  Is it really impossible to transfer some or almost all parts of the code responsible for the text outside the core so that players from different countries can translate the game for themselves? Or if this is not possible, then why not trust some person who could translate the game into other languages? Or hire some person so that he can translate the game for individual donations, because if you patent the game or if it is already patented, then what are they afraid of?

P. S.  I don't understand anything about programming.

[Steve Walmsley]

Even if someone provided for free all of the game text translated into Russian, or a different language, that is the easy part compared to implementing that within the game. Each piece of UI text would have to be read from a file, or database table, to populate each window. I would have to write the code to do that, which is a huge task considering how much UI there is in Aurora. Also, the translated version might not fit into the same amount of space as the English version, so the UI would have to be able to cope with fields potentially being moved around to handle that, or someone would have decide on suitable abbreviations to fit the space (and to do that I would have to provide the space allowed for every single translated field or column).

It's all a huge amount of work. Plus, I wouldn't be using any of those features myself. As I am programming Aurora for fun, not for profit or to get a lot of players, it doesn't make sense for me to spend all my Aurora programming time for perhaps a year working on something that I wouldn't use. I would rather be spending that limited free time to implement suggestions or add new mechanics.

[nuclearslurpee]

Is there really no other way to easily translate the game? For example, as far as I know, you have moved some files outside the core of the program to a database file.  This file, where possible, was translated into Russian, but it is only about 10-15% of the entire text of the game.  Is it really impossible to transfer some or almost all parts of the code responsible for the text outside the core so that players from different countries can translate the game for themselves? Or if this is not possible, then why not trust some person who could translate the game into other languages? Or hire some person so that he can translate the game for individual donations, because if you patent the game or if it is already patented, then what are they afraid of?

P. S.  I don't understand anything about programming.

To expand on what Aloriel said a little bit: the usual way to handle translations is to put all of the game text into a set of "localization" files external to the game code. On the coding side, this means that every single place in the code which currently has hardcoded text has to be replaced by code that fetches the appropriate translation string, in addition to adding code that loads the translation files and stores them in memory, and/or modifying the DB to hold all the translation text (a DB may not be a good way to store these but it would probably work okay).

So there's several reasons that this is a lot to ask of Steve and unlikely to be done:

• Replacing every hardcoded string with a translation hook is tedious and boring. For Steve this game is purely a hobby so I doubt he wants to work on something so boring which would kill his interest.
• Similarly, pulling all of the translation strings out of the code into a set of files or DB tables would be tedious and error-prone.
• Likely, Steve would also have to write a lot of error checking/handling for the translations. Checking if a translation is complete before loading it, checking if a translation is the right length for the UI, etc. This kind of error checking is possibly the most tedious task of all since it is very difficult to abstract such things.
• Any translations would have to be provided by fans. Similar to the open-source debate, this would put Steve in a role as a project manager instead of a hobbyist programmer which he has no interest in doing.

If you really want a translation, probably the best approach would be to look at something like AuroraPatch, which may let you access these things at the code level or at least give an idea how you could develop a translation mod.

[ProfiPRO100]

Or is it possible to create a version of the game in a relatively "quick and easy" way, where all the text in each tab would be editable in order to erase it and write your own translation, so that after that all the text changed by the player is preserved? So that each text, using some kind of program or code, makes it possible to make it editable in every place where there is text.