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Call for translators

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Unvanquished is now ready again for translations!

We have the French translation almost done (around 80%) which will likely be part of next release, and some old translations for various languages that need revisiting and updating.

Next release should also have a GUI option to switch language. For the moment, developers or curious people can change the language via the console by typing /set language fr (for example), then /updatelanguage (this won’t do anything with the 0.54 release as language packs were not shipped with it).

So we’re now calling for contributors in that area too. For reference, we do this here:

Also, we’d like to ask you to not use the suggestion feature but instead to submit a translation and marking it as “Needs editing” using the dedicated checkbox, as Weblate makes it easier to deal with strings marked as such, unlike the suggested ones.

Weblate English user interface, Unvanquished Breton translation
The Weblate online translation tool

We are currently trying to translate the most important strings, that is, those that will be exposed to players directly. We might increase the scope of translations to less important strings (such as text output by admin commands), but this needs some preparation work to have them actually translatable.

If you find a string that is not translatable in a given language because translating would break the variable ordering, please leave the string untranslated for now. This may happen with obituaries and event messages like that. We’re working on solutions.

Nearly a decade ago, we had translations working for several languages, but the translation feature fell into disrepair. So we had to do some work to get it going again:

  • Move the code module that handles translation out of the Daemon engine and into the Unvanquished gamelogic
  • Fix a bug from 2015 that stopped translation from working altogether
  • Implement an HTML tag for translating text and mark translatable UI strings with the tag
  • Clean up translatable strings so that they would be easier for translators to deal with (e.g. by removing unnecessary color codes or whitespace)
  • Set up the web interface for translators

We would like to thank Weblate, for they generously provide us the service free of charge.