KSP Localization Needs - Inventory

[swjr-swis]

My apologies in advance for not being able to do this in each of your respective languages individually. Hopefully you will understand this enough to participate.

 

In the KSP Weekly (formerly known as Dev Notes) of 2016-Oct-21, @SQUAD mentioned the following:

On 10/21/2016 at 11:42 PM, SQUAD said:

This week, there has been also a lot of work on localizing the game: we’ve been reviewing the overall solution for localization while making sure that we will be able to support mod localization. During this localization process, some of our devs had to learn in depth the insides of the KSPedia to come up with a solution for its localization. We still can’t announce which languages we will include, though, but we would definitely love to hear your opinion.

Notice the last part I marked bold. There has not been much response to this in the thread itself, and I have not seen any formal/official inquiry from Squad anywhere in the forum. I don't want Squad to get the incorrect impression that there is no need for KSP to support other languages. So I decided to start a poll here in the International section of the forum.

Let's use this to let Squad know about our localization needs and wants. The above does not specify if they mean a translation of the texts in KSP, support for other characters sets, or support for other keyboard layouts - localization normally means all of those, so let's talk about all of them.

Edited October 26, 2016 by swjr-swis

[Gaarst]

Using a Latin non-English keyboard is not hard. Just remember to change your key bindings from Qwerty to Qwertz/Azerty or whatever (I just copy paste my settings.cfg file in my new installs out of laziness now).

For the translation, I have no problem with English even though it's not my first language and I'm used to play KSP in English, so TBH even if there was a translation, I'd probably stick to English. Although I still think translations are a good idea, they open up the game to new people who may see English language as a barrier.
The translation should be decent of course: not only in terms of languages (typos, grammar and such) but also for the meaning of words, to avoid losing the jokes (in part descriptions for example) or simply to keep the astronautical vocabulary accurate.

[Shpaget]

In general, I'm against localisations. They are usually done via lang files where individal words or short phrases are translated out of context. English language does not have the same grammar as some other languages, which leads to very noticable issues in the translated text, something that only draws attention and breaks the immersion.

If I giggle at and think about poor translation, I'm not playing the game.

I would like to have support for my keyboard, though. Some actions are bund to .,:; etc. On my Croatian keyboard when not set properly, I need to punch some language specific letters, and I seem to be unable to remember which one I should press.

That being said, I don't need those characters in game. My space program is entirely in English.

[kerbiloid]

The game has not very large vocabulary, and most of English words probably more or less familiar for the auditory of interest. (Otherwise they can just store them in mind like space hieroglyphs)

But probably, the jokes in part descriptions would be separated from descriptions themselves. Otherwise sometimes it's hard to distinguish a meaningful part purpose from an English funny one (especially when the former one isn't present).
Say, as additional Kerbal assistant's phrases on demand

Spoiler

.

Edited November 7, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Tex_NL]

Squad, please don't waste time on translations. I understand you want to make the game more accessible to certain people. But please, PLEASE can we focus on actually finishing the game before adding ever more needles fancy features?

[Dafni]

1 hour ago, Tex_NL said:

Squad, please don't waste time on translations. I understand you want to make the game more accessible to certain people. But please, PLEASE can we focus on actually finishing the game before adding ever more needles fancy features?

I'm with you on this, a 100%!