German translation, lets start

Attachment	Size
scriptmaster.xls	5.43 MB

Hey guys, my first post here and a longer one even ^^

Today I wondered if anyone already thought about translation of Skywind to have a proper German version @ release time. Official Morrowind was translated to some languages and German was one of them, too. I played it for ages and loved it. That's why I joined chat and asked for it being of any use right now. I got in touch to taerkalith and he gave me some great lead to all things we need for a proper translation. This is what I want to start here and today. I saw at least three threads of guys who want to translate Skywind by now and I think we should team up to get this massive task done!

First my references:

I am a native German speaker (sort of... I am Bavarian ^^) with massively improved German Gymnasium school English. It was improved by taking part in ReactOS Project and becoming the main responsible guy for German translation there. Thus I have experience with short space to accomplish a proper German translation of English text in a whole operating system, so we should be able to get things in shape for a game when teaming up, too.

What you have to keep in mind:

1. Morrowind tends to write small stories as answers to your screen. This is a problem in the Skyrim engine. One text block has a limit of 149 chars. If these chars are not enough you can use a automatically set response to it with 149 chars again and again and thus generate a fluent and longer text output. This is commonly used in the English text everywhere. Problem here is that each of these responses triggers another part of voice output with the same information like these 149 chars cover up and to keep all subtitles and voice output in sync we need to take the information of each block and translate it + keep the char limit. I know that German tends to use more words and grammar stuff which adds even more chars, but anyway... I think it's doable.

2. English script is not 100% translatable! tearkalith sent me a directly useable and reimportable script (see below), but we have one problem there. Some of the text blocks still don't follow the 149 char limit. So we have to keep that limit in mind ALL THE TIME! If we stumble upon one English block which is too long, we should report a fix for it IMO, too.

3. If really needed, add another 149 char response, but keep this in mind: The voice acting will stay silent at that text lines then... So this must be the last joker to use if nothing else can be done to fit stuff in.

4. We have to keep one style of translation. If anyone uses other slangs and dialects, we have a problem with the fluent text style ingame ^^

Script is below as attachment. I am uploading the XLS file to Google Docs, too. Check it out and we can start to give anyone parts to translate. If you want access, give me some examples and PM a mail address for the access and I will give you the links to Google Docs and the needed access.

Here is some stuff we could use too: https://tesrenewal.com/forums/morroblivion-mod-releases/rel-morroblivion-germandeutsch-v064

Last edited by dreimer on 17 Jan 2015 - 05:58.

Well... eh. Good luck? It is

Well... eh. Good luck? It is gonna be hard to keep the diversity up whilst also having a high standard of voice actors in German, I imagine. Much fewer people around the world speak it than English but, good luck!

It's just subtitles,

The discussed idea is just subtitles. No plans for german VA at this point.

I've only taken German for

I've only taken German for four years (love it), and I would totally help if I could, but yeah, viel Glück.

Why don't you use the german

Why don't you use the german translation of Morroblivion?

https://tesrenewal.com/forums/morroblivion-mod-releases/rel-morroblivion-germandeutsch-v064

I think by using this you won't have to translate nothing or very very less at all and just have to bring it into skywind ;)

The German translation of

The German translation of Morroblivion is used so as far as I understand it. For him it is indeed mainly to limit the text where each line of dialogue may include only 149 characters. Many texts in Morroblivion have more than 149 characters and therefore a mere 1:1 transfer does not work. The documents must be updated and kept to sync to the English language edition.

For comparison: Morroblivion used 37473 lines of text alone for dialogs that will all adapt for Skywind need a lot of time, patience and above all hardworking helpers.

Greeting [External image]

Hey guys, I would love to

Hey guys, I would love to take part in this translation project. I am a native German speaker as well but I spent around 1.5 years in Sri Lanka. During this time, my English improved largely (well, it's definitely not perfect, but I think it's quite good). At the moment, I'm still a student at a German Gymnasium and therefore, I don't have much time to work on this project, but I will try to take as much time as possible.

Jeremias

Raubkopiesäbel wrote:

Raubkopiesäbel
The German translation of Morroblivion is used so as far as I understand it. For him it is indeed mainly to limit the text where each line of dialogue may include only 149 characters. Many texts in Morroblivion have more than 149 characters and therefore a mere 1:1 transfer does not work. The documents must be updated and kept to sync to the English language edition.

For comparison: Morroblivion used 37473 lines of text alone for dialogs that will all adapt for Skywind need a lot of time, patience and above all hardworking helpers.

Greeting [External image]

Problem with the translation of Morroblivion is, they use CSExtender to bypass the char limit and thus be able to nicely translate the maximum 149 chars long English responses. Such a tool seems to be non existent for Skyrim yet... If anyone finds something else, feel free to mention it here ^^ Otherwise we surely can use the texts from Morroblivion of course, but we have to shorten it to 149 chars

dreimer wrote:

dreimer
Problem with the translation of Morroblivion is, they use CSExtender to bypass the char limit and thus be able to nicely translate the maximum 149 chars long English responses. Such a tool seems to be non existent for Skyrim yet... If anyone finds something else, feel free to mention it here ^^ Otherwise we surely can use the texts from Morroblivion of course, but we have to shorten it to 149 chars

For this purpose, it is said that many English dialogues in Morroblivion also be used as provided in Oblivion more characters. We have not started doing to increase the text limit. [External image]

The Morrowind dialogues were indeed originally made only for a single text box.

You can even try it if you can increase the text limit in the SkyrimEditor.ini.

[Localization] iExtendedResponseLength=255 iExtendedTopicLength=161 bAllowExtendedText=1

Greeting [External image]

taerkalith found something

EDIT: OK Raubkopiesäbel was faster than me ^^

taerkalith found something nice to bypass the <150 char limit: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30423/?

Additionally he will send the tools he used for export/import so that we can make a same style XLS from Morroblivion AND use more than 149 chars. + he will send a newer XLS for the translation with all persuasion dialogue which is missing right now. Seems like this task mostly contains text reading for bugtracking, copy paste it (taerkalith recommends tes5edit here) and adding all stuff which is missing due to engine differences.

If you are still looking for

If you are still looking for people to read the texts for bugtracking, I could help you out a bit. I am native German :)

I am open for any support. :

I am open for any support. :-D As soon as the XLS from Morroblivion is there we could try to do the copy paste by script (Comparing the English Skywind and Morroblivion IDs) or we have to do so by manually searching the same texts.

EDIT: Here a step by step plan made by taerkalith which could help us to get things in shape quickly and in a very good quality :-D

-------------------------------
Here is my proposed plan. Feel free to use it or come up with your own. We already have scripts that can do this sort of work with some small modifications. If you want to take this route let me know and I'll get the computer scripts/macros written.

PART I
1. Export both english and german morroblivion scripts using tes5edit (this includes all lines and their ID numbers). We currently have no morroblivion dialogue scripts that contain ID numbers (really important for importing!) so this is necessary.

2. compare english skywind to english morroblivion using a macro in microsoft excel. Get the script the export any matching dialogue lines with their reference IDs in an excel spreadsheet.

3. replace the english morroblivion lines in the excel spreadsheet with the german ones using a script in excel that replaces based on matching IDs since they should have the same IDs.

4. run a script which replaces the dialogue lines of english skywind with those of german morroblivion based on the english ID values. (this concludes the perfect matching line portion of translation)

PART II
5. run a new script which searches for unmatching lines in skywind. If a line does not match get it to record it with it's ID in a new excel spreadsheet.

6. manually go through this list and translate it. If one's translation abilities are good enough, they may be able to ctrl+f keywords from the skywind english dialogue in the morroblivion german dialogue to find quick translations. Otherwise they will have to create original translations.

The other possibility is to have our Step I script to match up all english and german morroblivion dialogue lines so someone can search a part of the unmatching english skywind dialogue in the unmatching english morroblivion and hopefully find a match, then use the english morroblivion ID number to find the corresponding german morroblivion ID number and what will be a pretty close translation that will only have to be modified a little.

7. once translations are created, use a script to import the translations into the skywind.esm replace skywind lines with german lines based on line IDs (similar to the end of step I)

As another native German

As another native German speaker, who has been looking around the forums for the last couple of days in search of a good way to help, I would be glad to help out with the German translation.

Quite some interest here,

Quite some interest here, nice :-D

As soon as I got all stuff needed together I will tell you and we can start with a maybe auto merged base of the Morroblivion script into Skywind ID format. There will still be enough left todo for sure.^^

Hi, I am also German and I am

Hi, I am also German and I am on this website for quite a time. I never really found a good way to contribute any skill to this project. I hope I can assist you with this translation project!

taerkalith recommended to

taerkalith recommended to talk to zilav about the needed scripting. He answered we should try this instead. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/29457/ Anyone ever tinkered with it? Otherwise I will try around a bit. Seems to be a omni solution to open TESV and TESIV stuff for exports.

wow, I'm always blown away by

wow, I'm always blown away by what tools people develop on the nexus. Dreimer, feel free to get back to me with what data you think you'll need from me once you've explored this application. Just to note, currently major dialogue changes I've made are not included in the skywind.esm, they remain in separate .esp files. They will be in the next build so you may need to wait on this depending on how this application works (but perhaps not, you'll have to look into it's functionality).

@dreimer: I wanted to give

@dreimer: I wanted to give them this tool also know about (I've unfortunately forgotten yesterday [External image]).

The ESP-ESM Translator has been the most important tool for Morroblivion German translation. I have had very good experiences with it.

You can use it to transfer existing translations as xml file and save to updated versions of the Skywind.esm. Articles from external .esp files can also this should be so transferred and translated to new versions of .esm be merged with the .esm.

Wen ID of texts in Skywind.esm the same name as in Morrowind_ob.esm
they can also try this direct to transfer.

I also like to help them whom they want.

Greeting [External image]

Nice, OK. Will play around

Nice, OK. Will play around with it the next days. Working time is a bit... stupid here.

Are there any plans for

Are there any plans for making a synchronization?

Not from my side. I think

Not from my side. I think English with GerSub is fine^^

Well, I would prefer GerSub

Well, I would prefer GerSub only, without english speech, but this will also be possible, right?

Sure I guess. Anways, I will

Sure I guess. Anways, I will have to wait a bit until the big project the following weeks is over before I can really start here. If you wanna start tinkering with the tools mentioned, feel free to. I will join in later.

As I saied, i would control

As I saied, i would control-read the texts for error spotting, but I think I am not the best for using this tools since I've never used anything like that for any TES game.

Just give me the texts and I'll correct them. ;)

Hey, so here are the final

Hey, so here are the final scripts from tearkalith:

https://tesrenewal.com/files/germantranslationversion.xlsx

Next: Sort of the same needs to done from Morroblivion English to have the differences between the String location here and there. If this is done, we can move all stuff from the German Morroblivion script to the English Skywind master. Sadly my spare time is non existant still... I hope to have some spare time next week... God I need holidays... BADLY!

Still work makes it hard to

Still work makes it hard to do anything... First project done. Second and last is next week. Then I have time again ^^

If anyone takes this back up

If anyone takes this back up in the future, there's an updated translation document that can be found here