Talk:Translating

Looking at the implementation, this seems largely simple. There are plenty of volunteers who would help provide translations too. I think we should go ahead and open a translation branch.

Some considerations

• You've raised this point, but detection of language is important. We can getlocale and providing the translations are appropriately named, they could be used
• The actual language detection needs to be exposed properly to MTA too. What i mean to say is, i think more than just the text is going to be affected. In terms of e.g. the main menu, alterations may have to be made to suit other languages, for example the font. Currently we're using images for text in the main menu too - that may need to change for foreign text. We may also want to consider a getLocaleEnvironment scripting function so scripters can adjust language too.
• My main worry currently is CEGUI's lacklustre support for foreign languages, i.e. the current limitations of the unicode implementation. Namely Arabic which is very basic, where we dont support lower-case or middle-case characters. It could be implemented, but it's very much language-specific glyph handling that would probably require someone with experience in the language to implement, or a factory-made algorithm we can steal (i havent found any). Again, it's more a limitation of MTA's unicode itself, but by extension will affect this rather significantly. It is worth noting that DirectX text remains unaffected, since it processes entire words of text rather than individual characters as CEGUI does. This is the reason why i have not deemed this issue a priority, since chat and dxDrawText can still be used fine by servers. It may be worth looking into some hack to draw text by DirectX for CEGUI instead.
  • I've added some support for arabic and hebrew using the MiniBidi library. There are other languages we may need to consider in future - as far as I know Indic will require a special library as well. But we should be able to proceed with Translations from here, it might be worth opening a branch after the main menu is complete. --Talidan 10:25, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

User:Talidan 00:58, 16 January 2011 (UTC)