Are you translating a theme to another language? Reading this might help you.
Inside every theme there'll be a Languages folder. Inside that folder is where language files are stored. Example:
Languages/
en.ini
ja.ini
Here we can see 2 language files: en for English and ja for Japanese. It's a standard to name language files in that format (language-COUNTRY.ini). In my case, I did a Portuguese translation, but since there's also Portuguese from Portugal I had to name the file pt-BR (BR = Brazil).
You probably already noticed a _fallback theme in the themes folder, but if not: it's where things that are necessary for every theme gets stored, so when someone is making a theme the game doesn't blow up. The same goes for Languages: it's important to also translate the fallback for your language because the theme you're translating might not have every string that it uses on it's own folder.
To start our work, create a new file for your language(-COUNTRY, if needed) and don't forget to use the .ini extension. You can do this on Notepad with no problem but I would recommended using an actual editor like Notepad++.
Now open en.ini and your new language file, then copy all the content from en.ini to your language file. You can close en.ini now.
This is an code example taken from Soundwaves theme.
[Common]
WindowTitle=Project OutFox
StepMania=Project OutFox
# Dedicated Character Display strings
ModelLoadError=Model for %s (%s) Has a invalid model. Please check if the model.txt file is correctly named and formatted.
ModelAnimLoadError=An animation file for %s's model (%s) is invalid or non-existant. Please check the animation folders and see if there's any file missing.
LocationLoadError=Current Location (%s) is missing its location model. Please check if the model.txt file is correctly named and formatted.
SongLoaderSingleSong=Random Song Play: Current Folder only contains 1 song. OutFox might get confused when picking the song via random. Selecting to index 1.
SongLoaderNoSongs=Random Song Play: No songs were found in your OutFox install folder! Switching back to fallback music.You can see on this image and on your file that every line has a Title=Value, and that's how translation works on OutFox, you need to translate the value of the titles and you're done. The theme does all the work of what string it should use.
Now, you can't just translate literally everything that you see. On ModelLoadError for example there's a "%s" that means the theme or the game will put a string replacing that %s.
An example of that can be seen on the string %d Song Played that you'll see on the next image.
[Screen]
HelpText=&BACK; Exit &START; Select &SELECT; Options &MENULEFT;&MENURIGHT;&MENUUP;&MENUDOWN; Move
[ScreenWithMenuElements]
HelpText=&BACK; Exit &START; Select &MENULEFT;&MENURIGHT; Move
StageCounter=%s Stage
EventStageCounter=Song %iYou'll also see lines like &START;, &SELECT; etc. They're buttons that will be replaced once the game draws that string. Let's see one of those strings in action?
[ScreenSelectProfile]
SingularSongPlayed=%d Song Played
SeveralSongsPlayed=%d Songs Played
PressStart=Press &START; to join.
Here we can see that &START; gets replaced by a green square that represents the start button, and %d gets replace by a number that's how many songs that profile played.
Another special string is \n. It creates a line break. For example, First Line\nSecondLine would result in:
First Line
Second Line
Here's a example in action from _fallback/en.ini:
You might also want to translate the theme in a way that someone who has never played before will understand it, instead of expecting everyone to already know what everything is. A new player might not understand what "holds" mean if that word is translated to your language, but if it was kept as "holds" the user would know that it's the literal name of the thing and not something that should make sense in your language.
Another hard example are steps: in OutFox, there are 2 kinds of steps. The ones that you press in gameplay and the steps of the chart made by the author (easy steps, hard steps...). In English, it's easy to only say steps because it makes sense for both, but that isn't the case with every language. That's why I decided to keep it named "steps" for the pt-BR translation of Soundwaves.
I hope that this helps you to translate your favorite theme to your language so more people can come and play the game with it. Thank you for reading and have a nice day.
Many folks are already helping translate the new Soundwaves theme for various languages. As requested by one of our translators, we'll mention those projects below in order to give them some visibility and encourage more people to join and help.
° Japanese - Done by はぬべき(hanubeki)
° Portuguese-Brazilian - Done by zerinho6, SHRMP0 and SheepyChris
° German - Done by DanielRotwind
° French - Done by Ksempac and Kaede573
° Español - Done by JoseVarelaP
Translating can be boring and tedious. Sometimes it's hard to locate & remove lines that shouldn't be there or find missing ones. Because of that, translators themselves create tools to make our job easier and faster.
Translation Toolkit is a tool made by Ksempac to help remove lines that are not needed anymore, warn about lines that are missing, check your progress, etc.
This project is intended as a small application to automate some tasks for translators.
It is able to parse, analyze and fix the OutFox translation files.
Stepmania-TranslatorViewMaker is a tool made by Snil4.
Have you ever tried to translate a program like OutFox and wondered "Hmm, now where can I find that line in the .ini?" Now there's no need to wonder! This program will make a translator view file for your translation .ini and make you translation job easier.
Tiny-Webini is a tool made by zerinho6 to help with translations of the Project Moondance Website. While not used to translate OutFox (unless themes adopt HTML in the future), it uses the same translation system as OutFox. It makes less HTML code or none at all being necessary to translate the website.
Translate Project Moondance with the same style OutFox uses for its translations.
When doing a mention to "Steps", ask yourself: is it clear which "type of Steps" you're referring to? We have the following "types of steps":
- Steps, which means the notes inside of the chart or the note count.
- StepDifficulty, which means the difficulty selected of the chart, such as Novice, Expert, Hard.
- Step, which means the action of stepping in the pad or a single note.
- StepType, which means the quantization (timing/color) of the note (e.g. 4th = red, an entire beat; 8th = blue, half a beat; etc).
Soundwaves does not have this issue as it says "Taps" instead of Steps and directly says the difficulty.
Imagine you're editing the Soundwaves ScreenCaution and want to see how the translated string looks. You don't need to restart the entire game to see the changes, here's what you should do instead: Exit the screen you just translated, reload the metrics (Shift + Insert; or Shift + F2 on older alpha versions) and enter the screen again.
Some themes might have a problem where not all strings are updated when metrics are reloaded due to how they are made. In that case, unfortunately the only option is restart the game.
Now that you have translated the latest alpha, you need to send it to OutFox somehow. This tutorial explains how you can do it!
The first thing to keep in mind is that each OutFox translation is hosted inside Tiny-Foxes to easily maintain and keep track of updates, so enter contact with Team Rizu on any of their available social medias to get invited into Tiny-Foxes.
OutFox translation repositories adhere to a standard style. Repository title should be:
"OutFox-[languageFileName[-COUNTRY]]"
"-COUNTRY" should only be added in special cases (example: there's Portuguese from Portugal and Brazilian Portuguese, so the Portuguese-Brazilian language file is "pt-BR.ini").
The description of the repository should be:
"[Language Name] ([languageFileName]) Translation for Project OutFox""
Here's an example:
OutFox-ja
Japanese (ja) Translation for Project OutFox
The repository should have 2 folders: "_fallback" and "default". Inside the _fallback will be the _fallback translation and default translation inside the default folder.
Only the translation file is required to be inside the folders/repository.
It's recommended that you include the version that the translation is targeting inside the files. Here's an example:
# Version: 4.9.7 Alpha
[Common]
WindowTitle=Project OutFox
StepMania=OutFoxSo you finished the translation for this alpha before the release? You can then commit directly to master OR make a Pull Request with your files to OutFox-Translations so Jose_Varela includes them in the next alpha release.
This all assumes you're already a member of Tiny-Foxes and member of the translator team.