FreeGameDev

Hi
I am a Australia National Student on my Free Open Source Development project, now I want to translate this very interesting game "me and my shadow" into Chinese, but I don't know how to implement it, could you please give me some help and support, just tell me what tools to use, and I will do the rest. Thank you very much!

Hello ming.yan2,

ming.yan2 {l Wrote}:I am a Australia National Student on my Free Open Source Development project, now I want to translate this very interesting game "me and my shadow" into Chinese, but I don't know how to implement it, could you please give me some help and support, just tell me what tools to use, and I will do the rest. Thank you very much!

Any help is welcome!

There's only one problem, acme_pjz already made a Simplified Chines translation for the game.
Luckily the levelpacks can also be translated, so I'll explain the progress of translating.
Our plan was to translate not long before the release to prevent the need to update the translation when a new string is added or one changed.
But I don't think the texts in the levelpacks will change before the next release.

To translate the game, there needs to be a translation file (.po) for that language.
The .po files are generated from a template file (.pot) which contains the strings from the game/levelpack.
There are many tools that can be used to create .po files, one of them is Poedit.

Start poedit, select File->New catalog from POT file...
Now select a 'messages.pot' file from either <data-dir>/locale/ or <data-dir>/levelpacks/<packname>/locale/.
You'll need to fill in a few details and you're ready to start translating.

When your done you can save the file using the POSIX naming convention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale#POSIX_platforms

If you've got any questions left, feel free to ask.

Hi Edward_Lii
Thanks for ur reply! wannna if there is a translation team there so i can join them and make a contribution to the translation work?

Hello ming.yan2,

First of all, thanks for your interest in helping out.

ming.yan2 {l Wrote}: wannna if there is a translation team there so i can join them and make a contribution to the translation work?

MeAndMyShadow is a relatively small project so we don't really have teams.
This basically means that anyone who wants to help with either art, coding, documentation, translation, etc. can contribute.

Besides that the translation support has been added quite recently, there's no stable release with translation support built in.
Up to this point we only had people saying they want to translate the game in language X, so no multiple translators on one language.

As you can see the translating process still needs to get shape.
My idea was that we introduce a string freeze before the Release Candidate in which a .pot file will be created that the translators can use to translate.
Once done they post their translation on the forum or contact us in another way.

The downside of this is that collaboration is quite hard, except for pointing out translation errors and/or let one translator translate a levelpack and the other the game.
And since one of the core developers already translated the game in Simplified Chinese only levelpack translations are left.

Sorry for the long post.

I hope everything is clear, if you've got any questions left feel free to ask.

So how I can submit the translation results, what i need to do is just submiting the po. file to the fourm, am i right?

Hello ming.yan2,

ming.yan2 {l Wrote}:So how I can submit the translation results, what i need to do is just submiting the po. file to the fourm, am i right?

That's basically it, just upload the .po file here.