Translation Guide

An Overview of the General workflow when you have everything setup and are translating:

(* Just for reference and won't be present in final guide)

1. Make changes to a .po file with Poedit.
2. Save and automatically compile into a .mo file.
3. Copy and paste .mo file into files/lang in fheroes2 installation folder.
4. Startup game. (The language will already be set in this case since basic setup should be already done.)

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Let's group the documentation into categories in the same style as rest of the wiki:

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Terminology/General information:

Terminology:

• .po/.mo/.pot
• MO file goes in files/lang folder of installation.
• PO file is found in files/lang of github source.
• A String/Key
• ISO Abbreviation

Info:

• Currently non-English accents and characters will be replaced with white space (or not?)
  • You should still make the translation using the language specific characters so that no change is needed when the characters are supported.
• The recent language select implementation by ihhub
• Setting language using fheroes.cfg in /appdata/fheroes2

Translation Program and Environment Setup:

Windows/Linux/Mac:

• Poedit - https://poedit.net/download

• Posting a PR with the translation on github (Ex. Github Desktop for Windows.)

• Usage of Poedit:

  • Set Poedit to NOT automatically compile to mo when saving
  • Warnings and what to ignore (e.g. strings starting with % will give warning but can be ignored)

In case compiling to .mo using makefile is still necessary:

Windows:

• Cygwin64 (still needed?) – with packages: gettext -dlevel, sed, iconv, make.

Linux:

• A way to compile using the makefile and installing the necessary packages.

Mac:

• A way to compile using the makefile and installing the necessary packages.

Translation tips:

• Staying within a certain amount of characters for UI - E.g. Speed: Very Fast, needs to be max 9 characters
• Placeholder references like %{race}
• #Fuzzy comments
• Context using pipes – e.g. speed|Very Fast
• \n – newline character - Usage should usually match English string.
• Look at other language files
• Look at other New World Computing Heroes series games.
• Ask for help in translation channel in fheroes2 Discord server

Current limitations:

• Upper case for creatures E.g. The Dwarves do 15 points of damage.
• Noun genders - English only uses "The" while other languages have genders like Italian Il/Lo/La/L'/I/Gli/Le

Contributors for the various languages:

French:

Norwegian:

Zense - https://github.com/zenseii

Polish:

Russian: