French translation

[Xia0ben]

Hello there !

With a group of queer friends from the french LGBT+ community NextGaymer (https://nextgaymer.com/), we decided to try advocating for LGBT+ themed indie games and their authors, and help them make their awesome stuff be more accessible to french speakers. After a bit of digging around on itch.io, we found Butterfly Soup and loved it ! And we would love to help and contribute a french translation to it, if its fine with you ;-).

In order to spread the word about the game to french-speakers, we then would like to stream this translated version during our third Online Festival at the beginning of april. So we wondered if there is anything we could do to ease the integration of the translation in the game (given that some of us are devs, including me) by then =).

Looking forward to your answer, and to help bringing great queer content reach more people in the world !

[hackerncoder]

And we would love to help and contribute a french translation to it, if its fine with you ;-).

Well.. The entire reason I created this was to help others translate the game.

So we wondered if there is anything we could do to ease the integration of the translation in the game (given that some of us are devs, including me) by then =).

If you are talking about getting it into the game on itch:

1. I do not have access to it.
2. Brianna Lei doesn't seem to be accepting new translations: https://brianna-lei.tumblr.com/ButterflySoupFAQ (Second entry)

This is the reason I created this, to allow others to translate the game when Brianna wasn't doing it anymore.

For this project:

• I/we need to figure out how to distribute the translations. One way would be to bundle up the entire game with the translations, another would be to create a script that would "install" the translations to a real copy from itch. Should probably be tracked in a different issue.
• I would like to make it easier for people to translate the game. This is tracked in Lowering the barrier of entry with better tools/websites #2. I have tried to setup Weblate on my server however I could not get it to work.

There is of course also all the stuff ""behind"" the scenes with Ren'Py. E.g. how I created the translation files.

[Xia0ben]

Thank you for taking the time to answer ! =)

Do you think Brianna would be willing to share the game sources with you so that it could be built with the translations ? It may very well be the time-consuming task of integrating and building the game executables again with new translations that made her adopt this stance, so if we could relieve her of this load, maybe she would consider it ? I guess you may have the sources already and that's how you created the translation files ?

Isn't the most common way to distribute translations in a game to generally include them in the main executable, so that users do not have to fetch them on a later date, improving the UX ? If translations absolutely need to be separate, would having a small UI in-game to load a translation file on the fly (that the user could download from wherever) suffice ?

In my collaborative translation experience, the script text files would be copy/pasted in a google document / sheet / etherpad that allows live collaboration and editing. Simple and efficient, helps with consistency since everyone always works on the latest version, and no need for non-dev contributors to learn about a new tool ;-). Since, as long as a translation is not complete, it is not really usable in-game, adding it in one go to the game from there works reasonably well.

[hackerncoder]

Do you think Brianna would be willing to share the game sources with you so that it could be built with the translations ?

The sources are in the itch download. Using a tool you can unarchive archive.rpa in the game folder to get the source files.

It may very well be the time-consuming task of integrating and building the game executables again with new translations that made her adopt this stance, so if we could relieve her of this load, maybe she would consider it

It is. We don't know until we try.

I guess you may have the sources already and that's how you created the translation files ?

We all do. I just know more about how Ren'py works.

Isn't the most common way to distribute translations in a game to generally include them in the main executable, so that users do not have to fetch them on a later date, improving the UX ?

Yes. The files for all the current translations are in archive.rpa.

If translations absolutely need to be separate, would having a small UI in-game to load a translation file on the fly (that the user could download from wherever) suffice ?

That's another way it could be done. And it is even better than my ideas. I could create a new version of butterfly soup that Brianna would just have to upload.

In my collaborative translation experience, the script text files would be copy/pasted in a google document / sheet / etherpad that allows live collaboration and editing.

That is a good idea. However I want to do more than just that. Using something like Weblate should make it easier in general for people to translate the game.

[Xia0ben]

Oh, good to know !
I've never had the occasion to try Weblate, but it seems like a great software !
Given the number of nice LGBT+ visual novels on itch.io, it would indeed make sense to try a tool such as this one, you are right.

[hackerncoder]

For the translations:

Make a fork or download it or however you like.
Copy the general folder under translations into a new folder with the name of the translation you want to create (french in this case).
Find or create a font that has the necessary letters for your language (the font found in BS English is in the games game folder and is named yunush.ttf, it only has the letters in the English alphabet). You can always use arial.ttf, a copy exists in BS and can be found in extra-files.
Change all mentions of general.ttf in translations/<language>/screens.rpy to the name of the new font and all mentions of general to the language.
Change all mentions of general in the .rpy files in translations/<language/tl/ to the language and begin translating in those files.

[Xia0ben]

Thanks for the precisions !
We've started translating last saturday, and will be continuing this afternoon. We shall do a pull request as soon as we've completed on Framapad and verified it ;-).
Ah, it might be of interest to you : I spun an instance of Weblate on my own server, hmu if you want me to create an account for you to try stuff out ?
Wish you a pleasant day =).

[hackerncoder]

Great to hear! I would very much like to try out weblate. Possibly you could help me set it up on my own server?

[Xia0ben]

I've using spun my instance with a simple click using Yunohost, but you can use the very straighforward install script in https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/weblate_ynh to install it on a debian-based server, it should work quite fine (you can always have a look in the file, it's well commented).

[hackerncoder]

Hey @Xia0ben, what's the status?