87 lines
3.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
87 lines
3.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _doc_importing_translations:
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Importing translations
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======================
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Games and internationalization
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------------------------------
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The world is full of different markets and cultures and, to maximize
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profits™, nowadays games are released in several languages. To solve
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this, internationalized text must be supported in any modern game
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engine.
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In regular desktop or mobile applications, internationalized text is
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usually located in resource files (or .po files for GNU stuff). Games,
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however, can use several orders of magnitude more text than
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applications, so they must support efficient methods for dealing with
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loads of multilingual text.
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There are two approaches to generate multilingual language games and
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applications. Both are based on a key:value system. The first is to use
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one of the languages as the key (usually English), the second is to use a
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specific identifier. The first approach is probably easier for
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development if a game is released first in English, later in other
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languages, but a complete nightmare if working with many languages at
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the same time.
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In general, games use the second approach and a unique ID is used for
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each string. This allows you to revise the text while it is being
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translated to other languages. The unique ID can be a number, a string,
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or a string with a number (it's just a unique string anyway).
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Translators also usually prefer to work with spreadsheets.
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Translation format
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------------------
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To complete the picture and allow efficient support for translations,
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Godot has a special importer that can read CSV files. All spreadsheet
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editors (be it Libreoffice, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc.) can
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export to this format, so the only requirement is that the files have
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a special arrangement. The CSV files must be saved in UTF-8 encoding
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and be formatted as follows:
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+--------+----------+----------+----------+
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| | <lang1> | <lang2> | <langN> |
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+========+==========+==========+==========+
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| KEY1 | string | string | string |
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+--------+----------+----------+----------+
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| KEY2 | string | string | string |
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+--------+----------+----------+----------+
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| KEYN | string | string | string |
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+--------+----------+----------+----------+
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The "lang" tags must represent a language, which must be one of the :ref:`valid
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locales <doc_locales>` supported by the engine. The "KEY" tags must be
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unique and represent a string universally (they are usually in
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uppercase, to differentiate from other strings). Here's an example:
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+---------+------------------+----------------+--------------+
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| id | en | es | ja |
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+=========+==================+================+==============+
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| GREET | Hello, friend! | Hola, Amigo! | こんにちは |
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+---------+------------------+----------------+--------------+
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| ASK | How are you? | Cómo está? | 元気ですか |
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+---------+------------------+----------------+--------------+
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| BYE | Good Bye | Adiós | さようなら |
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+---------+------------------+----------------+--------------+
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Import dialog
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-------------
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The import dialog takes a CSV file in the previously described format
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and generates several compressed translation resource files inside the
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project.
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Selecting a CSV file autodetects the languages from the first row and
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determines which column represents which language. It is possible to
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change this manually, by selecting the language for each column.
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.. image:: /img/trans.png
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The import dialog also can add the translation to the list of
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translations to load when the game runs, specified in engine.cfg (or the
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project properties). Godot allows loading and removing translations at
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runtime as well.
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