Translations

Language identifiers

Languages are represented by their 5-letter name (as in "en_US") or, for female variants, by their 6-letter name (as in "fr_FRF").

Inside the database, female variants are handled as distinct languages from male variants; however a number of rules exist

(The 5- or 6-letter language identifier is lossless from the game's "dialog.tlk" path; this simplifies backups etc.)

Translations

String translation is handled through the use of the translations_X table, where X is a 5- or 6- language identifier. This table contains data similar to the game's .tlk file, except that it is indexed by native strings instead of strrefs.

Any native string absent from this dictionary is left untranslated; only its markers (see below) are discarded. This is intended as a sane default value where the player, when a string has not (yet) been translated, will see the string in the original language, which is most often English.

Markers

Native strings can contain markers of the following form: {?text}. Such markers are discarded when a native string is used as the default value for a game string in the absence of an appropriate translation.

These markers, however, are seen by translators when translating the native string to another game language; most tools will even highlight them (these look like Python formatting parameters). It is thus strongly recommended to include markers in native strings to signal any possible grammatical ambiguity including at least the following cases:

• distinguishing verbs from nouns etc.: "{?verb}guard" vs. `"{?noun}guard";
• marking grammatical gender where it is not obvious: e.g. "come here, my dear {?male}friend".

Keep in mind that translators, when translating a string, will generally not have access to context beyond the string itself. Make liberal use of markers to help them produce quality work.

Gendered languages

When producing translations for gendered languages, the general case is that a single translation will be produced for both gender variants.

Gender markers

The empty marker {?} is a special case. Including this marker in a native string marks this string as needing two translations for gendered languages. This means that, while a single native string is present in the source file, the translator will be prompted to translate two strings, where the empty marker will be replaced by either {?M} or {?F}.

This marker has no special meaning for non-gendered languages; in this case the translator will see only a single string, still bearing its empty marker.

Conversion to strref

Conversion between native strings and strref is performed iby the strref_dict table in a way similar to the resref_dict table. The algorithm for generating new strrefs is of course different (the lowest available value is used).