French to English conversion

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coolman66
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French to English conversion

Post by coolman66 »

Hi to all at DEFENCE FORCE a question ! is it possible to convert any of the exellent French text/graphic adventure games to English, I seem to remember many years ago attempting to do this with the great LA'Aigle D'or,Can't remember whether i finished the project or not and whether i saved the finished version to tape ,if i did it must be in amongst the many many old tapes i've got storred ? As i am a Gamer and not a programmer it was only possible if the game was written in BASIC .I would be interested to know if anyone else has thought of trying this.As ther are many superb French Anventure games it would broaden the number of games available to the non-French speaking Adventure Gamers.While I'm going on about Games for the ORIC may I congratulate all the people coding all the new games ,including TWILIGHTE ,CHEMA and others , by there efforts they help to keep the Oric alive.
COOLMAN
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Chema
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Post by Chema »

Hi and welcome to these forums!

It would be indeed a nice idea. At least basic programs should not be very difficult to translate, as you say. Though I have never done so, I think there are tools in the OSDK that let you have a clean basic listing from the tap file, and you can edit as a txt file and build the tap again.

Unfortunately I have no idea of french, but it would be cool to launch such a translation project, if we find some volunteers to help.

Cheers!
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Symoon
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Post by Symoon »

I've done some translations in games (not for Oric), and belive me as soon as there's a lot of text, it becomes much more complicated that one would expect.
Example: there's a pun about Jacques Chirac in a game I want to translate from French to English.
Questions:
- how do I do to translate the pun ?
- do I keep the joke with Chirac, or should I transpose it with some personnality in UK? (if so, who?) Or drop it ?

Of course this is just an example. And it becomes even more complicated when there is a size limitation (I had begun translating Le Fer d'Amnukor with Jim, it's been on hold for years now).

Oh, also, a perfect translation can only be done by two people, each being a native speaker of one language, and both knowing a little the other's language and country.
Otherwise there will be translations misunderstanding, or mistakes, even typos (we have loads of funny or scary examples in French ;))
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barnsey123
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Post by barnsey123 »

Hi everyone. Approaching the problem from a different angle...

I wonder if the translation issue could be handled at the Emulation level (not suitable on a real oric). Perhaps, within the emulator (e.g. oricutron) a switch could be set that would then output any text to a seperate pop-up window which could then be translated - perhaps automatically - by google translate (or something). This wouldn't work for "drawn text" but for "normal text" just might work.
This would have the added benefit of working to/from any language without a horde of dedicated translators.

Ok, the translation would be poor BUT it'd give you a fighting chance.

I'll get my coat... :D
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kenneth
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Post by kenneth »

For the French version of Zebbie I used Oric explorer a ".txt" file and Euphoric but this is not very practical... :evil:
Antiriad2097
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Post by Antiriad2097 »

barnsey123 wrote:I wonder if the translation issue could be handled at the Emulation level (not suitable on a real oric). Perhaps, within the emulator (e.g. oricutron) a switch could be set that would then output any text to a seperate pop-up window which could then be translated - perhaps automatically - by google translate (or something). This wouldn't work for "drawn text" but for "normal text" just might work.
It could work with drawn text, especially for something like a text adventure. All it needs is on the fly OCR of a screenshot passed to the translator.
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