Official: Avorion Community Translation Guide

This guide discusses the basic ideas and guidlines of the Avorion Community Translation Project.

General Information

Lately, we received an increasing number of requests to translate Avorion to new languages.
The officially supported languages of Avorion are English and German, and while we will constantly keep those updated, we would love to add a lot more.

Sadly, we don't have the capacities and abilities to add more translations by ourselves; that's where you, the community, comes into play.

We decided to host a server where everybody can help to translate Avorion to his own native language:
https://translate.avorion.net

We hope that this idea will pay off and are looking forward to your contributions!

Translation Guidelines

Everything should be translated in a way that sounds as natural and free as possible. That said, there are a few things that should be considered:

• The meaning of the text needs to stay as close to the original as possible.
  
• The context of the text needs to be accounted for. Some sentences have different meanings based on context.
  Sometimes, extra context information is given, represented in a gray box.
  
• %-Variables and $-Variables need to stay in the translation unchanged. We use them whenever some part of the text is unknown during translation and will be filled in by the game, like "10 Ships" will be represented by "%d Ships", as the translator doesn't know how many ships there are.
  Most number-dependent translations will have one singular and one plural translation.
  
• Whitespaces need to be preserved. The translation needs to have an identical number of newlines, and trailing/leading spaces and newlines also need to exist in the translation.

Furthermore, additional care needs to be taken for factory strings.
As they get constructed by a combination of words and cases which grammatically depend on the target language, we have several case-dependent variables that can be used for the goods of the factories:

• ${good} - Used whenever the plain name of the good is used
  
• ${prefix} - Used whenever we need the good as a prefix
  
• ${plural} - Used whenever we need the plural version of the good

In that case, the $-Variable does not need to be translated with the identical $-variable, instead it can be chosen from one of those.

Example:
There are three forms of the good 'Diamond':

• Diamond (Good)
  
• Diamond (Prefix)
  
• Diamonds (Plural)

The string "Diamond Mine XL", meaning a very large diamond mine, gets created from the string:
${good} Mine ${size}


For questions and language problems, please contact us on the Translation Forum[www.avorion.net]

Suggestions Model

To avoid total mayhem, we follow a translator-validator model.

Translator

This is everybody who has a registered account.
Translators can suggest translations. The translation's status will then change from 'untranslated' to 'waiting'.

Validator

Amongst the people that have proven their knowledge and dedication, we will choose one or multiple validators for every language.
A validator can then review 'waiting' translations and accept or reject them.

Step-By-Step Tutorial

Regstration

This is the main page of the Avorion Translation Tool.
First, click on "Sign In":


Click on "Register":


Enter your desired Username and EMail, then click on "Register".


You will now receive a confirmation EMail. This EMail contains the activation link.
If you click on it you will have the possibility to set a password.
Either choose your own, or take over the suggested one.

Congratulations! You are now registered.

Translation

Now, you can sign in using your email and password.


You are now on the main page of the Translation Tool. Click on 'Avorion' to enter the translation Project.


You can now see the language selection screen. It is strongly recommended to only choose your mother tongue.
In our case, we chose 'French'.


This is the screen where the actual translation happens. First, search for untranslated sections by clicking on 'Untranslated', or, if you feel a little adventurous, on 'random'.
You now see a bunch of untranslated strings (if there are any).
Choose one where you would like to add a translation, and double-click on its empty 'translation' field.
You can also choose fields where you think that the translation is wrong and suggest a different translation.


Now, enter your translation suggestion and click on 'Suggest new translation'.

Congratulations! You submitted your translation suggestion. It will now be reviewed and once accepted, you will soon see it in the game!

[Greemur]

Add Ukrainian language project, please.

[Pedro]

Site not working. Cant export files

[Mr. n]

Found this by accident, but one thing stood out to me - "one singular and one plural form" ("%d ships"). In some languages, there are multiple forms for plural, even given same declension, just because that's how the language is built. There are some languages that have special form of "both" (untranslatable), like Mongolian, IIRC.

In Polish, there is "jeden stat ek " ("one ship"), "dwa/trzy/cztery stat ki " ("two/three/four ships") and "zero/pięć/dziesięć/sześć tysięcy stat ków " ("zero/five/ten/six thousand ships").

Welcome to translation hell on Earth :). If the primary game language does not take those ranges (1/2-4/0, 5+) into account, you're not going to have a good time. And since different languages may have different ranges, it would just be the easiest to ask for n ranges for every language and not have any main language for the game (i.e. have English defined as "[0,2+] = ships; [1] = ship" instead of singular and plural).

[war4peace]

I believe this discussion is abandoned, I asked for Romanian almost a year ago and received no response.

[abccba193]

@TyWuNon German is already in Avorion from Boxlware it do not need any Community Translation

[TyWuNon]

What about German?

[war4peace]

Hi, I have created an account, please add Romanian to the list of languages.
FYI I am currently localizing several large games on a permanent contract basis, having over 8 years experience in localizing games.

[Čer Wo]

can u add to Slovak project pls?

[Yuvalyly]

It's not on the list.

[Yuvalyly]

how do I translate to hebrew?