Добавлено: Пн Окт 27, 2014 17:50
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I'm going to start over, keeping all of Drakon's translations.
Hi everyone,
I've been following this thread for a while and decided to register on the forum today. This is my first post.
I've been a big fan of Eador for years, but only recently discovered the New Horizons mod. I downloaded Drakon's English version 13.0421 v1.5 two weeks ago and was impressed with it. I stumbled upon this thread while searching for any more recent translations, and for a few days eagerly anticipated the release of the 14.0920 version. I haven't played enough with it yet to notice any of the new improvements, but did quickly realize the limitations of Google Translate.
Let me start by expressing huge appreciations to Drakon and Boon947 for their respective efforts in the past and these last weeks. I love 4x games, but Eador is the best of them all for me, even in the vanilla version. Now, I do have a particular reason to write this, and to write this now. First of all, I don't understand a single word of Russian. However, I am a professional translator in Dutch, German and English, so I know my way around automated translation and localization tools. That's why I couldn't resist doing some research on if, and how, it would be possible to easily integrate Drakon's work into the new September release, and automate the whole process for future use.
I am now in the process of creating a so-called TM (Translation Memory) by a process called alignment. What this means is that I take both Russian and English 13.0421 var and text folders and put them through an aligner. Because of some problems with the Cyrillic character encoding, this unfortunately still requires some manual handling and review, which takes time. The end result of this is a TM, a kind of bi-lingual document that works as a database while using CAT-software (Computer Aided Translation), like the one I use, Trados Studio 2014.
The TM is a collection of TU's (Translation Units), with every line of all the var and text files stored separately. If I then take the Russian 14.0920 version and load those files into Trados Studio, it will automatically translate all lines that already occur in the 13.0421 version automatically. Even lines that are more than 70% similar will get hits from that TM, so translation is easier. Besides that, any line without a 100% match will automatically be translated by Google and flagged for review. Dictionaries or glossaries of terms can be integrated in the software as well. All in all, this is IMHO the best and fastest way to produce a high quality English version of the latest New Horizons release.
As an additional bonus, every newly translated line is added to the TM, so if a new version will come out in 2015, only the new content will have to be manually translated (or automatically translated by Google and then edited and improved). All lines that already exist somewhere, anywhere in a previous version, will be automatically translated.
I am abroad and on holiday now, but will be back home on Wednesday. I work freelance, so may have enough time in the near future to complete this project relatively quickly, say in about two weeks maximum. Inevitably, while revising the Google translations, I will also need the occasional help by native speakers, but I could gather issues that are unclear while I work, and list them on a publicly accessible Google sheet, rather then feed them piecemeal in different forum posts, so those of you who have the ability and some time, could just insert their suggestions and thoughts there.
@Boon947: It is not my intention to barge in on your work so far. Still, I am going to do this anyway, even if just for my own use, because I love the game and it deserves a translation that will do it justice. I don't need to share it with anyone, but I could easily do that of course, and I just thought it might save you a lot of time, if you don't own CAT-software and/or have no experience with automatic localization. Let me know what you think...