forum.defence-force.org

Hi all.

I wonder if it could be possible to start such a project for Oric games?

As we all know, maybe more than half of the Oric games archive is in French. Just because of that, I am not able to play them.

I don't want to start an issue of "which language is international". But what I know is nearly all the french frends already know to speak english but people in UK and other countries like me, French is not as common as english.

I always wish to play excellent Oric games produced after the firm is sold to France.

Some of The examples are :
S.A.G.A
FER D'AMNUKOR
DIAMANT DE L'ILE MAUDITE
AIGLE D'OR
SECRET DU TOMBEAU
DIAMANT DE KHEOPS
MASQUE D'OR
MONTSEGUR
MEURTRES EN SERIE
MANOIR DU DOCTEUR GENIUS
MYSTERE DE KIKEKANKOI
etc..

Arcade games might be played without knowing french but usually they are text-based adventure games that need to be interfered by keyboard commands

I know this is not a easy request but it could be easier than writing a new game, right?

There are many english and french speaking programming gurus amongst us. Can you tell me the probability of this?

Translating is much more complicated than it sounds at first.

1st, on the technical side: if you don't have the source code, the words you translate must fit in the same space than the original words. This can be a problem as, for instance, "épée" in French (sword) is a four letters word that you can't translate by "sword" which is 5 letters.
2nd, on the language side: my experience shows that for a good translation, you need either a real bi-lungual person, or (for our case) a French and an English person. If you don't some translations might sound weird, or even totally impossible to understand.
3rd on the cultural side - which is a bit similar to the 2nd. When there are cultural references (to TV shows, movies, other games or whatever), you'd better work with someone from the "original version" country so he tells you. And once you know, should you adapt it? For instance, if a game refers to François Mitterrand (French president in the 80's), should we change his name for someone in the UK?
4th on the time side - which is a bit similar to the 3rd. When something refers to old stories, should it be adapted to nowadays? For instance again, François Mitterand, should we replace him by 80's Margaret Thatcher or by nowadays David Cameron?

Jim Groom and I had begun working on translating Le Fer d'Amnukor loong ago, but it was so complicated that we never finished.

I've decided that in my elderly years I'll just learn French so I can read all the CEO mags ..

Hmm I got my answer with a big frustration Thanks anyway

Hey I'm not saying this to discourage anyone
But for people to be aware before doing it
That being said, of course some games are probably easy to translate!

Well that shouldn't be impossible for BASIC games... But as symoon said, it has some difficulties. And I'd add that you need to be quite an expert in the game, so you recognize the texts and commands, where they are used, if they give hints or have more than one evident meaning...

But as soon as the game has compressed texts or the parser is done in asm, etc. you'll have problems and it won't be an easy task at all!

BTW that's funny, in the list, "L'Aigle d'Or" had been translated, at the time... In Spanish

And Dominique released Meurtres en Série in English indeed, with the name Killing In Sark.
http://www.oric.org/software/killing_in_sark-1523.html

Chema wrote:But as soon as the game has compressed texts or the parser is done in asm, etc. you'll have problems and it won't be an easy task at all!

Oh, and we forgot the graphics parts holding texts (control panels, intro screens...).
That makes it all interesting projects, after all!

You can find an English translation of L'Aigle d'Or here :
http://jotd.pagesperso-orange.fr/oric_remakes.html

It's no longer an Oric game as it's ported to the PC and the Mac (here https://www.dropbox.com/s/98wot7fexayk3 ... X.zip?dl=0 ).

My plan is to port and translate some of the games you mentioned (maybe all) but it will take time.

JOTD tools allow the porting part to almost be automatic and then the translation (made by JOTD so far) is easy as we extract all the text in structs and we don't have the 48 Kbytes limit

Good news,thank you Hialmar

Some games have been translated in some form. Here is a basic translation of the instructions for SAGA.

The adventure games can be tricky. It depends on how much French is used in replies. Some allow easy input of words, but the replies can be difficult if your French isn't good.

Here's some French vocabulary as used in the Game Terminus on a CEO/JEO disk. The same sort of words can be used in other games.

Here's the(Le) Diamante de Maudite instructions from Your Oric magazine translated by Archimedes who was in fact Jon Haworth.

Page 2 had to be reduced due to file size restrictions.

Page 3 - a map. Always useful.