Angband 4.2.6 in Spanish

[hernaldog]

Hello everyone. I just wanted to let you know that I'm working on a very challenging project: translating Angband version 4.2.6 into Spanish.

This game deserves to be bilingual, as it's a classic of the Roguelike genre. I love it. I played Umoria for a year and then discovered this one, which is much nicer, with tiles, and I fell in love. I translated NES and SNES games back in the 2000s, and this project reminded me of how wonderful that hobby was, so I decided to take it on.

Within the general stages I've completed:

- I created a fork of the main source code, and then created a branch of Release 4.2 -> OK
- Understanding how to compile -> OK
- Understanding the structure of all the files: c, h, txt -> 90%
- Converting British/American units (inches, feet, pounds, etc.) to the Spanish-speaking system -> OK
- General translation is approximately 50% complete
- Pending tasks: adapting the simple American language to the complex Spanish. For example, an "apple" in Spanish has gender. It's a (woman) apple. In English, it's just "an"... and things like this have been the most difficult for me. Another pending issue is editing/translating images like "Armory", etc.

Help Needed

I'm taking this opportunity to ask for help. If you enjoy game translation and C programming, or if you simply want to help with final testing at a later stage, please email me at hernaldog@gmail.com.

-My humble progress here: https://github.com/hernaldog/angband...c-espa%C3%B1ol

I'll be posting updates here. Cheers!

Hernaldo Gonz?lez. Melipilla, Chile

(P.S.: Please excuse me if this post doesn't belong in this forum section. I couldn't find a more suitable one; feel free to move it to the correct section.)

Some captures:

[Nick]

This is wonderful, I have always thought this should be possible - but a lot of work. Some questions:
- Many of the data files, and some others like list-mon-message.h, have many text strings - are you just making Spanish versions of these files?
- Do you think it would be possible to organise the code so that all the text that needs translation is in such files, so that the translation job would become just translating those files (and adjusting the files that process them like obj-desc.c)?

[backwardsEric]

To avoid conflicts between changes for the translations and changes to other data in the data files, I would have a structure so that there is a file (or files, if one wants to break things up) with the strings for one localization. Something like monster.txt would still have "name" lines for each entry but those would just hold a code name that would be used to look up the localized name, description, plural, messages, .... The "desc", "plural", .... lines would either not be present in monster.txt or they would hold fallback text if there was not an appropriate localized string.

For grammatical gender, the current game uses monster race flags, "MALE" and "FEMALE", to specify the gender of monsters. That likely does not work if multiple localizations are supported (a given monster could have different genders in different localizations). Grammatical gender for monsters and objects should then be a separate, localizable, field which is then used in mon-desc.c and obj-desc.c to choose pronouns and articles (heaven forbid there's a language that requires verb conjugations to match the subject's gender - that would further complicate how Angband builds messages about objects or monsters).