EmulationStation localization (translation)

rtissera

Yes, I'm interested and I'm willing to help with translations

EctoOne

@cyperghost said in EmulationStation localization (translation):

I'm not against a translation but not convinced.
The UI of ES itself is self explaining ... And I think lots of translation will end in an english/american slang and a literally translation can sound "antique"

I'm also not very convinced. I personally barely use the UI anymore. It was a one-time setup for me and then I spend a lot of time with the scraper. That was it. Nowadays I just start games.
I do offer my help tho to do a German translation when the time comes. Even if I probably won't use it myself.

StephanePare

I think it's needed because there's a whole host of people who don't understand English at all and this would open RetroPie to millions of people. Even if all it did was allow some people to properly configure things properly when they first open their system, it would still be worth it. Beyond that, lots of us make these things for families or loved ones with no understanding of the English language, and those will simply be more at ease seeing familiar words on screen even if the UI to choose the games is simple enough to not need to read the UI.

Really, to those saying it's not worth it, where's the last open source project you saw whose managers thought it's not even worth it to translate it?

Personally, i'm not just volunteering to translate ES into French, but the entire wiki as well, plus building an image where french is enabled by default end to end.

BuZz

@stephanepare Sounds like recalbox may be more suitable for what you want. The goals of RetroPie (well - mine at least), are not to make it into some "out of the box" consumer device/software (although it already is to a certain degree).

I think a translated wiki would create more problems than it solves as it would no doubt get out of date/sync with the main documentation.

Hex

I agree with @BuZz here. Having more than one documentation is not ideal. It will certainly get outdated soon.

I also believe that localization will fall behind if a dev needs to add a feature and we dont have translators for all languages supported at hand.

If you can guarantee that your support for translation will always be present within 24 hours then possibly this could be acceptable.

jdrassa

@Hex regarding EmulationStation specifically, I don't think it would be a big deal if the localization falls behind. For users that don't know English, a partially translated application would still be better then no translation.

darknior

@BuZz i'm agree with you for the WIKI, so many work to translate it and maintain it like the US one. Not a good idea :( ... I write this and however i LOVE french lol

@jdrassa I'm agree with you. It is really important to have a french version, almost for children that not starting to learn English before 12 years old ... and not really understand it fine :(
A partially translated application would still be better then no translation.

fluffypillow

I can help with a Hungarian translation as a native speaker; the wiki translation is probably an overkill though, for the reasons @Hex mentioned, and also because to my experience, such documentations tend to be either full of foreign technical words, or their awfully literal translations (eg. translating "interface" literally as "human face between multiple layers of things" - from the official manual of some Cisco router).

On the other hand, after the initial setup ES2 is seen by more people (eg. friends, kids) and more often than the RetroPie setup menu. Those who want to know what letters to press on the controller config screen or see their favorite games may not necessary be the same people who formatted the SD card, put BIOS to the right place or set the correct shader files in some config file.

meleu

Hi all.

To me the OP is very clear: this is a poll about EmuationStation localization (translation).

Nothing more, nothing less. Can we be on this topic? :-)

My answer: Yes, I'm interested and I'm willing to help with translations (Brazilian Portuguese).

Actually I'm happy that @Robotechvfx has a friend able to help with Brazilian Portuguese. As I'm used to spend my "RetroPie time" helping others here in the forums, or fixing/adding features to my scripts, but I would like to help with that if someone starts it.

I agree that the main target audience here would be children (at least on my arcade build where many of my kid's friends come to play).

Hex

For the record I am willing to help with translations to Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati, Bengali and other Indian languages as needed (If no one else volunteers.)

cyperghost

@meleu

I agree that the main target audience here would be children (at least on my arcade build where many of my kid's friends come to play).

Yes that's the reason I also told to @Ziguranam, that for kids it would be very helpfull. But I'm still sceptic for translation and the approach being more "userfriendly" in total. But well... The approach of doing this isn't hard. How many expressions are there needed to be translated? 30 words? 50? 100? It's just a small amount, that can be done in a reasonable time ;)

Hex

If the target audiance is children then shouldn't we do this for ES-kids ??

meleu

@hex doesn't ES-Kids try to be more or less as up to date as the RetroPie's branch? Maybe @Zigurana can confirm that.

fluffypillow

@cyperghost @meleu @Hex I'd not narrow it down to just kids -- for people who simply don't need to use english in their everyday life (remember, not everyone is a tech person) a translated UI can be more comfortable than a foreign language one. After a quick search for TextComponent creations, it seems there are about (or, at least) 50 phrases to translate; I'd say the problem would be more like making complex scripts, like arabian or indic render correctly.

(sorry for the off topic; I'm probably not the one this topic is for, but I just happen to be interested in languages)

Hex

Cant we just have Strings in a single file per language and use compile time options to decide the language?

jdrassa

@hex said in EmulationStation localization (translation):

Cant we just have Strings in a single file per language and use compile time options to decide the language?

@Hex How would that approach be any better then what was proposed on Github? The Boost library is widely used for localization purposes and wouldn't require users to build from source to switch the language.

Hex

Sounds good. I have no experience with boost. If that seems to be a better approach, so be it.

Zigurana

@meleu
I am probably not going to update the Kid-kiosk branch anymore, I'd much rather work on getting it into RetroPie properly.

pjft

@zigurana let me know how I can help there.

Robotechvfx

@meleu Glad you like the idea of translating Retropie to Portuguese.
The only thing we need to do know is start.
If this Idea moves towards fruition, like I said I can do the portuguese - Portugal because I am a native and my girlfriend, if she agrees she can do the Portuguese Brazil because she is native in that.
Now you know, if this moves forward you only need to contact me with the details for us to start.