Translations system

[Blueberryy]

Would love to help with Russian translation for this omega radio addon :p

[Grocel]

Currently the radio does not support translation/localization very well yet. It would be a while until I can add proper support to this.

Do you know anymore people that could do translation beside English and German (Me)?

If I was to start a translation project I would like to add more common languages such as German, Polish, Ukrainian, French and maybe Chinese and Korean.

[Blueberryy]

Well, you can create discussion on your addon page with like "TRANSLATORS NEEDED" and pin it so people who loves your addon might help

[Grocel]

I will do. However I will prepare the addon to have translatable strings before hand. At the moment many strings with English texts are hard coded into the project.

[Grocel]

Upon closer inspection a complete translation of this addon is impossible with GMod shipped tools. And I don't like building custom stuff around stuff GMod should handle.

GMod does not support long translated contents, particularly if it contains many UTF8 chars as such as Russian text would. Each translated string must not be longer than 1024 bytes (not chars!). Facepunch/garrysmod-issues#5524

We could still setup a translation for all the short strings. But the quite long error explanation texts would have to stay in English.

[Blueberryy]

Upon closer inspection a complete translation of this addon is impossible with GMod shipped tools. And I don't like building custom stuff around stuff GMod should handle.

GMod does not support long translated contents, particularly if it contains many UTF8 chars as such as Russian text would. Each translated string must not be longer than 1024 bytes (not chars!). Facepunch/garrysmod-issues#5524

We could still setup a translation for all the short strings. But the quite long error explanation texts would have to stay in English.

How about implementing translations system from Zombie Survival gamemode then? It's pretty simple and It's free to use in any addon https://github.com/JetBoom/zombiesurvival/blob/master/gamemodes/zombiesurvival/gamemode/sh_translate.lua

[michak89]

Happy to help with polish translation.

[Grocel]

A translation system will be released soonish. It will be similar to that of the Zombie Survival one. It will be utf8 encoded and will also support escape sequences for non-english letters. Each language (locale) will have their own file. Their naming scheme will be: ll-cc, e.g. en-us, pl-pl etc. It is defined according to ISO 639 and ISO 3166 respectively, all lowercase.

The max length of each entry is theoretical unlimited. The addon will ship with a template generator that generates empty locale files that can be imported.

locale files are Lua files and they will look similar to this:

local LOCALE = LOCALE
if not istable(LOCALE) then
	StreamRadioLib.Language.LoadLocales()
	return
end

LOCALE.locale = "en-us"
LOCALE.title = "English (US)"


-- ========================================
-- Category: entity
-- ========================================

-- Original: Play
-- Old:      Play
LOCALE:Set("entity.radio.play", [[Play]])

-- Original: Stop
-- Old:      Stop
LOCALE:Set("entity.radio.stop", [[Stop]])


-- ========================================
-- Category: otherstuff
-- ========================================

-- Original: 🍪
-- Old:      🍪
LOCALE:Set("otherstuff.cookie", [[🍪]])

-- Original: 🍪
-- Old:      🍪
LOCALE:Set("otherstuff.cookieEscaped", [[\u01f36a]])

return true

[Grocel]

After a long time, it is finally there.

Basics

The addon is completely localizable now, within reasonable constrains. Adding new localization should be relatively straight forward for contributors.

Please take a look at https://github.com/Grocel/3D-Stream-Radio/blob/master/lua/streamradio_core/locales/en-us/init.lua to get started. Use debug_streamradio_generate_locale <locale> to create a template for your new locale: Like debug_streamradio_generate_locale ru-ru for Russian (Russia).

German localization

I made the German localization also shipping with the update.

A few hints on making a localization

• Follow the instruction and rules in the locale's init.lua.
• There are quite a lot of strings to translate, so things might get tedious to write and test.
• You can use Copilot. It understands the instructions as well and produces somewhat decent results. Give it a solid prompt just to be sure.
• If you use AI tools, you might want to tweak the results afterwards. AI results quality might vary between languages and used models.
• Use the English localization files as he original translation source.
• I can not review anything that is not English or German. So if you contribute I need to blindly trust your work to be reasonably decent.
• Contributed work are given extra credit in the Language selection box.

Debugging

There is also a debugging option to help you with context. It is selectable only with developer 1/2. If selected it will replace every translatable string by its identifier.

[BlackIceKB]

Fantastic