Fate of the World translation project

Thank you for helping to translate Fate of the World.

To get started, visit https://pootle.red-redemption.com/accounts/register/ to create an account on our translation server. Then please email support@red-redemption.com to let us know the name of your account and which languages you want to work on and we will add you to the project. You will need to agree to assign us rights in the language translation you do so that we can distribute it. In return we'll add you to the credits and you will gain a right to use the translations non-commercially.

Once we have added you to the project, you can go to the Fate of the World (public) project and pick a language to start translating!

After selecting a language, you will be shown the Overview page for this language. To start entering translations for the language, click on the ll.po link, where ll is your language's code name (in our screenshot, we are translating the into German, and the language code is de).

Translating

The Translation page will prompt you to enter a translation for each string in the game. If you are sure your translation is correct, you can press Submit (or, Ctrl+Enter) to save it. If you are not sure, you can optionally mark the translation as 'fuzzy', in which case it won't show up in the game; later on you can review all the fuzzy translations and correct them.

Some of the messages in the game will have special formatting codes that change how the game displays text. It is important to preserve these codes as is in the translated string. Codes that look like {foo} control formatting, while codes that look like %(foo)s represent placeholders that will be replaced by another term when the game is running. Finally, \n represents a hard line break.

Testing the translation

You must have version 1.1.2 (or later) of the game to test translations!

When you are ready to try your translation in the game, go to the Review screen and click the 'Export MO' link. This will save a file, fotw.mo to your computer.

You will now need to locate a directory share\locale within the installation directory of the game on your PC. If you bought the game from Steam, this will probably be something like C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\fate of the world\share\locale; otherwise it will be something like C:\Program Files\Red Redemption\Fate of the World\share\locale.

Inside this directory, create a directory that matches your language code; within this directory, create a directory called LC_MESSAGES; it is within this final directory that you should move the downloaded fotw.mo file. For example, if you bought the game on Steam and were translating the game into German, you would save the file as C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\fate of the world\share\locale\de\LC_MESSAGES\fotw.mo.

Now tell the game to use your translation in the settings screen, and then quit and re-launch the game.

A note about fonts

We don't yet have suitable fonts for all the languages that people are working on. If, when you launch the game, the text doesn't appear, or you get a series of small boxes instead of the text, then we need your help to find a font for your language!

We suggest you look for a suitable font on the http://www.google.com/webfonts site. All the fonts on that site are free to use, but if you know of a better font that is freely licensed for us to use then go ahead and try it.

When you want to try out a font, drop it in the share\ogre\common\100_fonts\fonts directory in your installation directory. Then take a look at the share\fontmap directory; the files in this directory tell the game what font files to use when a particular font name is requested. Copy an existing font map such as el.lua so that it matches your language code; then edit the file so that it points to your chosen font. When you next launch the game, it will read that file, and pick the fonts you specified.

The font names we use in the game are as follows:

vollkorn

most text throughout the game

DroidSerif

letter to new president

Droid

numbers in telemetry

cheboygan

menu text, dialog titles

MutantA

animated intro text

Gothic

animated intro text

When you have chosen a font, please let us know and we'll add it to the next version of the game.

Translation project forum

We set up a forum where translators can discuss and co-ordinate their work.