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you like to have an italian translation?

Ambrois LeGaillard

Ambrois LeGaillard

Sailor
Well, mateys,

in Italy there's a saying "Tradurre, non tradire" that may be translated in "Translate, not Betray".

Have had my own days of highly delusion after have seen the scandalous italian translation of "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion", a thing that given to me tears and nightmares a lot, I want make to you the Godfather don Vito Corleone offer...

"un offerta che non si può rifiutare" (an offer that will be not denied)

If you like, and approve, I will do for our page and all PotC-NH players a very good and accurate PotC-NH italian translation, based into the spirit of this saying.

Maybe the words will be not the same, but I will give into this translation all the prestine spirit that pervade the game.
I ask you in rreturn only a thing: some help about eventual English sayings, because I consider that, as Marx Brothers movies, some word jokes and English original sayings are highly hard to show at the public.

Well, tell me if you like my offer, and meanwhile, I will continue to explore the XVIII century Caribbean.
 
I've been at it for over a year and still plenty to do before I'm done (not to mention future updates). It's really a huge task but the hardest part is finding all the things that need to be translated and adding the corresponding code, and I've already done (hopefully all) that. That groundwork can be used for any language, you only need the corresponding folders in TEXTS and DIALOGS and a lot, and I mean A LOT, of time and patience. There are some more complex switches that may be needed in some parts but the grammar of Italian is probably close enough to that of Spanish that they will be needed in more or less the same places and with similar structure so my work can be used for guidance in that too.

If you really want to do this, I can give you a more in-depth guide.
 
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@Homo erectus:

some big problem of Italian language, is that some sayings aren't translable.

Here's an example, a famous Clint Eastwood saying:

Go ahead. Make my day.

Probably every Englishman or American haven't any problem to understand this phrase, but for an Italian viewer this Dirty Harry's phrase, translated by the letter, hasn't sense.

When I have said about Marx Brothers movies, was the same problem: they had a their way of talking, maybe from yddish and other slang that are impossible to translate into Italian language.
 
That happens with every language. Idioms are always tricky. That is what I like about translation, it's not just mechanical work, that's what Google translate does. In a good translation there's a fair bit of creativity and careful word-crafting involved.

But that's the part we can't help you much with, because you're the one who speaks Italian. We can explain some English expressions but it's you who must find the Italian equivalents. Other than that we can only help on the technical side.
 
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One word is going to give you nightmares if you do try to translate the game. Pronouns.

In English, the thing belonging to a man is "his thing", regardless of what the thing is. The thing belonging to a woman is "her thing". The pronoun depends on the gender of the person who owns the thing.

But in Italian, I believe the pronoun depends on the gender of the thing instead. And just to throw even more confusion into it, "her" is also a different pronoun, as in "something happened to her". So "her" is going to have to translate into different Italian words depending on context.

Good luck. xD
 
I tried to work around that issue for some words like 'for'. I have two entries, 'for' and 'for1'. In English they're both set to display as 'for', but in Spanish, one is 'para' (as in working for someone) and the other is 'por' (as in buying something for X pieces of gold). It's fine for invariable words but I guess things would get slightly more complex when preprocessors are involved.
 
A Russian programmer and I were setting up a map with a travel time estimate. In English it would be "Estimated time: 3 to 5 days" but in Russian there is no equivalent to "to" in that display. He solved it for Russian by making it the equivalent of "From 3 to 5 days."

Compared to things like gender and the above problem, translating idioms is simple enough: you aren't going to transliterate them anyway. Use a similar local idiom.

I remember an example of a very early attempt at computer translation. "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated to another language and back became "The wine was good but the meat was spoiled."

An interesting game is translating a sentence into another language using google translate, then into another, then back to the original.

You might find the game has as many as 250,000 items that have to be translated. Be aware of what you're getting into.

Hook
 
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