Ultima V Lazarus: Spanish Translation In The Works, Help Wanted
I received an email from Shyrion Dragon this morning:
Hello, fellow companions!
I’m Shyrion Dragon, from Spain. I’m writing to you, after notifying this to Tiberius via facebook, to inform the community that I’m translating Lazarus into Spanish.
Unless anyone at Team Lazarus says otherwise, the “project” has started.
I haven’t any web by now, but I want to have one within a week.
If there’s anyone willing to help, they can email me to shyrion at udic dot org
Hail Britannia!
Shyrion Dragon
-==UDIC==-
Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Ultima V: Lazarus already has a French translation, after all…and if the traffic logs for the site here are any indicator, there are plenty of Spanish Ultima fans.
So, good Dragons and Dragonettes: if you are reasonably fluent in Spanish and would like to assist Shyrion Dragon in his effort to produce a full Spanish translation of what is probably the most well-known of the Ultima remakes, either drop him a line at the email address provided above, or make yourself known in the comments form below.
Hello to all!
I’ve recently talked with Tiberius and he will send a message to the German and French translators for help.
I know about languages, HUMAN languages, and a little about programming. I’ve been able to figure out how to extract the files of the french translation and the original ones, and I started the work “comparing”.
Any help is welcome. If you don’t “manage” well spanish verbs, don’t worry, I’ve studied my own language deeply and can supervise any doubts and “correct” the style if needed. If the community can gather two or three members with a reasonable “spanish level”, we can make it for sure in a reasonable period of time 😉
Well, Shyrion, I started a translation a long time ago, and I got the intro, and the first conversations translated (up to Empath Abbey I think) I’ll try looking for them.
There was a program to edit the conversations of the skrit files which was what I used, I’ll also try looking for it.
Finally there is a book editor that let’s you edit the books.
Translating the intro was different from the conversations because you had to edit the skrit files directly.
As far as I know, you don’t need much programming knowledge for the translation.
Well, I have been looking for it and I haven’t had any luck….
I found a folder with all the lazarus files unpacked (you can edit those directly) but it seems I deleted the folder with my translation…
The rapidshare link I uploaded it is also dead…
And I haven’t found that editor I used back then (which was really easy to use).
There are some eclipse tools developed by Project Britannia, but I don’t know if those will work well for Lazarus.
Anyway, if you are looking for Spanish translators, I recommend checking out ClanDlan or look up the people from the old Dantoine site (I worked with them when we translated Ultima VII expansion 8 years ago).
I don’t recommend american people translating to spanish mostly because their spanish is closer to the latin one than to Castellano (no offense here for anyone). Of course, if you want to do a neutral translation maybe that would be a good option.
I think I still have the Lazarus Dialogue in their original LDE format, with the Lazarus dialogue editor and the converter that convert the exported txt to Skrit. I’ll look into it because this would help you like… a LOT – especially if you want to add all the gender variations you need.
Editing the skrit direclty can be very very painful, because a slight coding error, a slight coma or apostrophe where it shouldn’t be (or even a different kind of apostrophe) could make the entire dialogue crash and lock the game. It is doable, but… one has to be very careful.
Also, I have no idea if the font used for Lazarus and the skrit itself will support specific spanish fonts (like say the inverted question mark)
In any case I definitly recommend looking at the french translation : the folder structure will give you notably a good idea of what files needs to be translated.
Notably for the intro and character creation, if you want to have gender specific stuff we had quite a bit of this in the french translation (this was painful to get working).
Finally I should point that there was quite a bit of art needed to be done in photoshop for the french version as well if you want to go that far (menu titles, spell names and so…). Again the french file will give you a good sense of what needs to be done in term of art.
I definitly hope you get more people to work with you because trully Lazarus has a tremendous amount of dialogue – I wouldn’t be surprised it it had as much as all the Ultima games combined. There are time I basically had to spend entire days from waking up to sleeping on dialogues to finally get this translation done. Crazy work, but well worth it.
If you have any specific question feel free to ask, altough the french version being 5 years I’ll probably won’t remember everything.
It’s sad that all of this is lost; don’t you by chance remember the editor’s name?
Anyway, the team that made the french translation probably has a tool that fits to the task, I’ll wait for their answer to me or Tiberius.
Many thanks for your advice; I’m planning to translate to “castellano viejo”, and yes, the “meridional” speaking is slightly different but grammar and orthography are the same; I was talking about this when saying “style corrections”. Logically I prefer helpers who know spanish of Spain, but I assume that if this task is to be accomplished by more that one person, there has to be revisions of the whole translation probably deeper than otherwise, and with the crisis I can do it full time XD.
Hello Sergorn.
Can you send this programs to my UDIC/Gmail account? or place it in the cloud so that I can take them?
And many thanks for all the advices. I expect to get people involved in this project, I’m conscious that this task cannot be completed alone.
I don’t remember having any trouble with the fonts, so I think they support spanish characters.
Sergorn I would also like to have that editor. For what you say, it was the same one I used back then and it seems I have lost it. I really would like to have it again.
if you could upload it somewhere (rapidshare or megaupload for instance) that would be great.
If you guys want, there’s plenty of storage space here at Aiera, and I’m pretty sure Sergorn has FTP access. Failing that, I’ll set him up with some.
That would be great! Better than the megaupload links, that are outside the community and expire in a time.
This afternoon I’ll install Joomla and post the first template to play with it. It’s a good idea to have the files stored here so that the work can be distributed.
If the English dialogue can be dumped to a text file my wife can help translate it. She’s from Venezuela. Some sort of format should be agreed upon so it can be put back into the source format as easily as possible. Requiring the translators to have a technical understanding of file formats and/or specialized editors is a mistake I think.
Okay guys, for lack of better now I’ve put a file on Megaupload there :
It includes four separate rar files.
LDE.Rar is the Lazarus Dialogue Editor which allows to edit the Dialogues in .LDF format.
dialogue_source.rar includes all dialogues in LDF format.
talk-cue objects.rar includes shrines dialogues in LDF format.
newde.rar is the program which allows to convert exprted LDF to SKRIT. Not that IIRC it is a Pearl program, so it requires it to be installed to work – and it also works through command like.
Now the way goes, is that you edit the dialogue with the Lazarus Dialogue Editor, export them to a .txt format and then uses NewDE to convert the .txt dialogue to .skrit
The .skrit file IS the actual dialogue file, so unless you did something wrong while editing the LDF file (ie, a wrong format of coma or an uncompatible font) the dialogue should then work as is in the game.
Of course one can also work directly on the exported .txt or the .skrit but as I said, it’s much easier to make mistakes that would cause fatal errors in it and will be hard to track down.
@Sanctimonia – using the Lazarus editor is actually much easier than editing the dialogue in text format, quite simply because the text versions has a LOT of coding in them which can make things confusing for someone merely doing translation job. With the Lazarus Editor, you basically have all the dialogues nodes, and you just need to edit it in the dialogue window, and the keywords just bellow. This is much easier than the alternative, and much less prone to cause errors. Just my two cents though.
Of course it’ll work better if I put the link :
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=24VVOTY9 😛
Downloading!
This will make possible to accomplish the task.
I agree with Sergorn. For what I’ve seen into the skrit files, it would have been painful for people who aren’t familiar with scripting, and source of many crashes.
I’m looking at the files.
Now that I think of it, editing the exported .txt file might actually be possible, and definitly easier than the Skrit file.
The hardest bit would probably be to add all the viariables when needed but that seems doable. In any case much easier than the editing the Skrit, and for some it might be easier than using the editor.
HOWEVER : Since I’ve never edited a dialogue this way, I wouldn’t know if using NewDE to created the Skrit afterward will work as it should. So I guess it needs to be experimented with.
Also one would still have to be careful : basically I would strongly recommend of using any program like Word or OpenOffice to edit the .txt file and stick with a simple regular Notepad.
Why ? Quite simply because most word processors tend to automtically adapts things such as appostrophes in order to use the “proper” version of it, but this tend to create issues, and the .txt definitly needs to have the base regular coded .txt, and no complexity of fonts.
Basically a dialogue should look like : “Hail to thee” and not “Hailt to thee”. IIRC correctly this kind of stuff tend to hand the dialogues when trying them… silly in a way, but this is why one has to be careful.
This is also an issue that can happen when using the editor if you try to do your dialogues in Word and paste it back into the editor, because the editor will keep some special characters even if those do not. So you can do that, but you just need to be careful about character coding in the your word processor.
Ok, Sergorn, this is of great help! For what I’ve seen, the dialog editor shows pieces of code as “$MarioName4” wich we can’t touch, I assume. The rest is easy, very easy. Your wife has nothing to fear of, Sanctimonia.
I think the project needs to have a web, a discussion forum and a proper task distribution. I’ll take care of the first two during this week.
Remember to mail me so that we can start organizing ourselves before the web is done, and start properly.
Thanks for all the support!
The “$value” are indeed variables – conditional variables to be precise. Basically the “$value” change depending on a sepcific set condition: which can be the sex of the Avatar, a companion being present, the time of the day and so on.
You can actually find their value in the .txt after the [Begin Dialogue]. They are always at the beginning of a dialogue.
You actually have to do some work on them and translate the values. For instance you’ll often find the value “$She” in dialogue related to the Avatar.
And you’ll need to edit the line in the text to fit like this:
[$she = if ($sex==1) then (“He”) else (“She”)]
Replacing “He” and “She” by the appropriate spanish values if applicable. This is true for other kind of variables.
Note that you will probably require to ADD similar value, and these should be the only one required to add as you translate, since spanish is less gender neutral than english is.
One example:
Imagine a NPC says to the Avatar “You are crazy!”
Crazy is gender neutral in english, but not in spanish, so you’d have to translate it like (here I use my barely remember knowledge of spanish)”
“Estas $loco !”
and add at the beginning of the dialogue something like this
[$loco = if ($sex==1) then (“loco”) else (“loca”)]
This is theorically doable with the .txt – but this is where the advantage of the dialogue editor is obvious, because editing and adding conditionnal variable is much easier with the LDE.
Of course assuming editing the .txt works properly to convert them to .skrit, then it’s all a matter of preference for each indivual translator to edit either with the LDE or the .txt
I strongly recommend against translating the .skrit directly in any case.
Shouldn’t all these nifty Lazarus tools be hosted on Aiera, so they’re easier for people to find in the future? I mean, isn’t that what we’re paying WTF for? 😛
I will be making some updates, to be sure, to include these tools. A few Laz/U6P/PB tools and plugins are available on the site right now, but others need still to be added…mostly the ones I was not previously aware of.
Ok. The “beta” version of the web is online. I’ve made it in spanish, logically. All of you willing to help, register! I will set up a forum so that we can organize ourselves.
I will too, include these tools at the website, so that the team can access them if needed.
I understand perfectly what you say, Sergorn. I think we will be in need of your experience in scripting sooner than later. Can we email you to your UDIC account? Or better that that, register at the project’s web; I will set up a thread in the forum for this matters.
Finally all is done. The project has a web and a “forum” (google group). I post here the links:
http://uvlspanish.ultimaaiera.com/
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/uvlspanish
You can also download my ‘updated’ version of the French version of Lazarus. Unfortunatly, all files were modified in .skrit format only, I never used the sources.
It contains all the fixes and additions that were published on the Lazarus forum for the English version ( 2 French convos were a bit buggy, and, for example, the ‘Join the Oppression’ issue was fixed in this version ).
All is based on the great work Sergorn and Dagon did 5 years ago.
I also sent you a message on Google groups about the DS way to tranlate UI and objets on screen names : I found how DS original programmers did this, and we can use a common file for those for Lazarus and U6Project.
Hope this helps.