The Dink Network

Translating in Italian

December 28th 2022, 09:10 AM
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armorking5
Ghost They/Them
 
Hi,

I am trying to translate Dink Smallwood HD in Italian very amateurishly.
I only found the translation files for the freedink version, there's differences or I can go on with those files?

Thanks!
December 28th 2022, 12:27 PM
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Baphomet
Peasant He/Him
I Like War. 
Si
December 30th 2022, 05:39 PM
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drone1400
Peasant He/Him Romania
C# nerd 
@armorking5
Hmm, I have no idea to what extent DinkHD supports translations...
February 16th 2023, 07:35 PM
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Seth
Peasant He/Him Japan
 
Dink HD supports no translation features. I could add support for .po translation files easily I think (example file: http://translationproject.org/PO-files/ca/dink-1.08.20190120.ca.po ) but unfortunately due to the restrictive licensing I cannot include it with the game itself. I'm not sure of the legality of offering in-game on the fly downloading of them...

It would be great if translators could be tracked down and coaxed into also releasing translations under a more open zlib style license.

There is also the possibility of adding internal auto-translation (see my work with Universal Game Translator) but uhh... despite many improvements, auto-translations still aren't great, but it might help Chinese/Japanese players, etc. in cases where no translations exist.
February 17th 2023, 04:32 AM
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drone1400
Peasant He/Him Romania
C# nerd 
@Seth:

I think it would be good if you could add support for .po files, even if you can't include the translation files themselves or automagically download them either.

The way freedink handles choosing localization, is by setting an environment variable, i think if the "LC_ALL" and/or "LANGUAGE" variable is set, Freedink will try to find a specific localization file in a specific path, although I don't remember what path conventions it used. I know you had to place the .po files in some weird subfolder. Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea if DinkHD used the same path convention, for compatibility reasons. I mean, if someone has some translations for a DMOD and they're placed in that specific path, they could launch it with both DinkHD and FreeDink without any extra fuss. Although, even if you used a different path, I suppose one could always use symbolic links or something to avoid duplicating the files :V

Edit: Woah, just had a look at the Universal Game Translator you mentioned, pretty interesting!

Edit2: Actually, I have to wonder, does Dink even support Japanese or Chinese characters? I imagine the original certainly doesn't, but I expect DinkHD and Freedink might be able to handle scripts that use any unicode characters?
February 17th 2023, 08:18 PM
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Seth
Peasant He/Him Japan
 
I try to figure out ways that things can be built in (or activated/downloading from inside the game, like Dink HD can do with DMODs) primarily so the mobile versions (iOS/Android) can use these features easily, otherwise .. meh, it feels like wasting the work if only certain platforms can really benefit.

Dink doesn't support unicode (utf-8 would break all of dinkc's internal processing, char16 less so) but Proton SDK's text renderer (which DinkHD and UGT both use) can, so if translation substitution is done at the last step it might work without too much fuss. Would need to add 40+ MB of fonts to cover most languages though. (not that translations exist for them all, but just thinking ahead)

Side note: I personally don't think I want to work on Dink right now but it's still fun brainstorming how things could be done if someone actually wanted to do it!
February 17th 2023, 08:41 PM
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yeoldetoast
Peasant They/Them Australia
LOOK UPON MY DEFORMED FACE! 
On the topic of Italian, there was a user called Federico who ran a site called Dink Smallwood Italia who I believe had made a conventional translation (i.e. editing scripts directly). Unfortunately, these direct script translations, of which there were several, mostly seem to be lost to the sands of time.

The weird Freedink subfolder to which you refer is i10n, short for "internationalisation", and indeed I managed to set "LANGUAGE" with export and have it kick in immediately. This was Yugoslav Macedonian, after setting "LANGUAGE" to "mk". You should be able to place any of these into i10n and have it just work, although DFarc3's drop-down box seems to be hard-coded meaning the newer ones like Friulian won't show up without the environment variable set.

For Chinese and Japanese characters (and Tibetan, Georgian, Armenian et al), it seems Liberation Sans doesn't include all the relevant code pages meaning that they'd just show up as squares.

I just remembered while typing this that there were official translations of the original game into both German and Russian that Seth could probably use unencumbered if he were able to track them down. At least I assume the Russian one was legit and not done by Team Fargus themselves...
February 19th 2023, 07:30 AM
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spinnerweb
Peasant She/Her Australia rumble
(?・ω・`) 
Translating the game into Italian would be too hard, think of all the new graphics you'd have to make for their hand animations.