Translations

[ShadesOT]

The text in Assets/XML/Text/ButtonPopup.xml needs translations.

[Nightinggale]

We don't have translations for those 3 languages in any of the files in Text. I'm completely open to getting the files translated, but pointing out a single file when the issue is with all of them makes little sense. I'm also open for adding new languages.

Historically TAC and RaR were made by German speaking people meaning it's actually an English translation of a German mod. This is why the German translation is always 99-100% complete and has some German comments in the cpp files. I think RaR had some French translations at some point, but I don't think it was ever completed, or at least it wasn't maintained and is incomplete today.

I would point to #108 as a solution to not adding languages where we don't have a translator. It will also make it easier for translators to locate the untranslated lines as it can be a matter of searching for say , as in the string is missing.

[ShadesOT]

I was thinking to collect all places where a translation is needed. We can collect that information in one issue or spread it over several issues. If we have several issues, we can handle the information finer grained.

And do I understand right, that all the translations are needed for French, Spanish and Italian, because google translate was used to create them?

[Nightinggale]

No, the "translations" are copy paste of the English lines because the game will crash unless there are strings for each, which is the problem #108 tries to solve.

[ShadesOT]

Ok, looking at all files in folder text, I see now, that the completeness of translations varies from file to file.

[ShadesOT]

I am thinking crowdsourcing is the way to go. I also think that crowdsourcing would need a change in the text file structure to be able to make it automated-ish.

[Nightinggale]

We already have a tool for translation here, though I have no experience in using it at all.

[Fuerstbischof]

I can offer you a belated christmas present: these are the changes which I've made on the fly during the RaR 2.7 game which I'd been playing since last summer. I've modded only .xml files in the text sub-directory since changes to other .xml files frequently lead to CTDs (of my ongoing game).

The starting point were the hints and historical quotes and especially the names of historical persons and founding fathers. To improve the accuracy I've usually replaced the English spelling, their pedia entries saw some changes, too. Colonial and native leaders also saw some rework. In general I've also slightly formatted their pedia entries. But tbh, (most of) the pedia needs a lot of work. Looking at the list of founding fathers you'll see some obvious 'changes'. Cross-checking with wikipedia was very helpful in this regard.

The next step were 'cosmetic' improvements to tooltips and pop-ups; I've also heavily relied on colour-coding of names and places, although that isn't fully finished yet. I've to admit that these type of changes makes reading the .xml files very unpleasing. It'd be helpful to have a general agreement which colours should be used at the various occasions so that the colour-coding could be added outside the text .xml files.

Although I favour playing games with the language set to 'English' I usually keep an open eye to the German translation. Especially the German Umlaute were written in two ways which both seem to be supported by the game engine but still left me wondering if that would be a good idea. Therefore I've converted ä to ä, ö to ö, ü to ü etc. To my pleasant surprise @Nightinggale recently announced the addition of UTF-8 support to the text .xml files. Luckily my changes can easily be undone. While cross-reading the English text I've often discovered that the Italian and Spanish text, sometimes also the French and German text, were not translated at all and even had an earlier version of the English text as a placeholder. I've remedied this by copy-pasting the improved English text. In the meantime there have been some changes so this has been for nothing but still...

While doing this I've also corrected a bunch of typos all over the place, and sometimes have slightly revised the text. If you run a few turns of a mature game you'll notice a bunch of changes to the log/Chronicle which improve readability.

---

Sadly, the game engine doesn't support sub-mods for the loaded mod. If you want to be able to undo my changes you'll have to use a mod enabler. For modding games I'm using JSGME, which I've included in the download. The mod enabler allows you to copy changed files into specified directories while keeping the original files as backup, so that you can easily undo any changes made.

The contents of the archive are to be unpacked directly into your Firaxis directory. Afterwards you'll see inside of it another mod directory. Click the mod directory, then the directory of my mod and the sub-directories to see the modified files. You'll see that its first sub-directory is named "Sid Meier's Civilization IV Colonization". That is name of my Civ4Col; change its name to the name of your Civ4Col - otherwise you won't see any effect from the modified files. Once done, go back to your Firaxis directory and start the JSGME.exe. After selecting my mod it can be activated by clicking ">"; if you want to undo any changes click "<".

http://www.filefactory.com/file/5nlt15tx1347/2.71_revised%20text%20files.rar

PS: Keep in mind that the uploaded files are work in progress ;-)

[raystuttgart]

We have people that work on translations. This will thus be taken care or already is.