This is a documentation for Board Game Arena: play board games online !
Translations
Using BGA Studio, the game you create is ready to be translated to each language by the BGA community. To make this possible, you only need to specify which string must be translated and how to combine them.
How translation works?
When developing your game, all strings must be in English. Strings must be coherent with the English version of the game.
Before the release of the game, BGA team will do the French translation of the game.
After the release of the game, the BGA players community will translate the game in every language.
What should be translated?
Every text that can be visible by the player when the game is running normally. This includes tooltips, texts on cards, error messages, ...
This does NOT include error messages that are not supposed to happen (unexpected errors).
What rules should I follow for the original English strings?
For a coherent and homogeneous interface, here are some rules about ending a sentence with a final period '.'
- As a general rule:
- If a sentence is displayed isolated in the interface => no final period
- If a sentence is followed or could be followed by another sentence in the same interface space => final period.
- In detail:
- No final period:
- button labels
- section titles
- menu elements
- links triggering an isolated action
- anything that is not a full sentence
- current actions in the status bar
- Final period:
- complete sentences (e.g., explanations and descriptions) that can be chained with other sentences
- Either a period or no period is acceptable (but this should be consistent throughout the game) for:
- isolated tooltips / small sentences
- game logs (no period is usually preferable)
- error messages (unless there is more than one sentence in the error message; final period is mandatory in this case)
- No final period:
Otherwise, you should try to follow as closely as possible the general style and format (including capitalization) used in the published English rulebook and game materials.
Focus on translating notifications
Usually, translating a website is simple: you just call a function on every string you have to translate, and the string is translated in the player's language. On Board Game Arena, this is exactly the same with the "_( string )" function.
However, there is one difference on BGA: notifications. The server is sending notifications to players, and most of the time the notifications are the same for every players, no matter what language each player is using. This is why notifications are translated on client side in the proper language, even if the strings are defined on server side.
WARNING: how to make sure your strings will be translated
For each game, our translation tool is doing a full scan of the code, looking for translator markers like "_()" or "clientranslate()"... (see below the list of translation markers).
If your original string is not "physically" inside one of this marker, it won't be translated.
// Examples: the following strings will be translated:
var mystring_translated = _("my string"); // JS
$mystring_translated = self::_("my string"); // PHP
$mystring_translated = sprintf( self::_("my string with an %s argument"), $argument ); // PHP
// Examples: the following strings WILL NOT be translated:
$my_string = "my string";
$not_translated = self::_( $my_string ); // The original string is not bordered by a translator marker => no translation
$not_translated = self::_( sprintf( "my string with a %s argument", $argument ) ); // Same thing
How to not make translators crazy ;)
- When you need the same string twice, try to reuse exactly the same string (with the same case) to minimize the number of strings.
- Do not mark as translatable a game element that does not have to be translated (ex: if the name of a monster on a card is "Zzzzz", maybe there's no need to translate it).
- Words does not come in the same order in each language. Thus, when you have to translate a string with an argument, do not write something like:
self::_("First part of the string, ").$argument.' '.self::_("second part of the string")
Write instead:
sprintf( self::_("First part of the string, %s second part of the string"), $argument )
(or the equivalent "dojo.string.substitute" in Javascript)
- When translators are going to translate your game, the most difficult task for them is to get the context of the string to be translated. The more the string is a short insignificant string, the more difficult is the task for them. As a rule of thumb, try to avoid insignificant short strings. You can also leave a comment on what is the context of the string in the translation program (English to English) if you are the developer of the game.
- The BGA translation policy is to be flexible on grammar... We prefer to write "player gets 1 coin(s)" than write two versions of the same string for plural and singular - it reduces the number of strings to translate.
- Instead of writing nice strings like "With the effect of ZZZ, player XXX gets a new YYY", which is very difficult to translate, write strings like "ZZZ: XXX gets YYY".
- Use present tense instead of past, i.e. "player gets wood" instead of "player got wood"
- Avoid using gender specific pronouns, i.e. instead of "player returns card to *his* hand" use "player returns card to *their* hand" or just avoid using it, i.e. "player picks up the card"
On client side (Javascript)
On client side, things are quite simple: you just have to use the "_()" function for all strings you want to translate.
Examples:
// Get a string in player's language:
var translated = _("original english string");
// Get a string in player's language with parameter:
var translated = dojo.string.substitute( _("You can pick ${p} cards and discard ${d}"), {
p: 2,
d: 4
} );
WARNING: in Javascript strings to translate, you should never use '\n', '\t' or such, as it will break the translation bundle and result in all the Javascript translation to fail. In any case, the strings will result in HTML code, and such character codes won't have any impact on the HTML rendering. You should use HTML markup instead.
ANOTHER WARNING: you cannot use this function _() in the javascript object constructor, but you can achieve the same if you use it the setup method
On server side (PHP)
On PHP side, you can use 3 different functions to specify that a string must be translated.
clienttranslate( "string to translate" ):
This function is transparent: it will return the original English string without any change. Its only purpose is to mark this string as "must be translated", and to make sure the translated version of the string will be available on client side.
In general, you use clienttranslate:
- In your states.inc.php, for the fields "description" and "descriptionmyturn".
"description" => clienttranslate('${card_name}: ${actplayer} must discard 4 identical energies'),
- In material.inc.php, when defining text for game materials that must be displayed on the client side.
$this->card_types = array(
1 => array(
'name' => clienttranslate("Amulet of Air"), // Thus, we can use "_( card_name )" on Javascript side.
- When sending a notification with notifyAllPlayers or notifyPlayer, in the game log string and all game log arguments that need a translation.
// A game log string with no argument:
self::notifyAllPlayers( 'pickLibraryCards', clienttranslate("Everyone draw cards from his library"), array() );
As a consequence there is no point passing variables to this function. E.g.:
notif="foo";
self::notifyAllPlayers( 'log', clienttranslate(notif)); // BAD
notif=clienttranslate("foo");
self::notifyAllPlayers( 'log', notif); // GOOD
Translating arguments is a little bit more complex. This uses the i18n special argument as below:
// In the following example, we translate the game log itself, but also the "card_name" argument:
self::notifyAllPlayers( 'winPoints', clienttranslate('${card_name}: ${player_name} gains ${points} point(s)'), array(
'i18n' => array( 'card_name' ), // <===== We specify here that "card_name" argument must be translated
'player_id' => $player_id,
'player_name' => self::getActivePlayerName(),
'points' => $points,
'card_name' => $this->card_types[8]['name'] // <==== Here, we provide original English string.
) );
To ensure the translation of the i18n argument will be made, clienttranslate must have been used somewhere, for instance:
$this->card_types = array(
...
8 => array(
'name' => clienttranslate("Amulet of Fire"),
...
Pay attention when using the i18n argument when translating arguments for the client: do NOT use same argument for both translations AND key codes for client-side actions (like using 'card_name' to move it on the player board as described in the example). It's pretty obvious in the example, but it can be very tricky when translation is made at the end of the development (which is often the case). Use explicit argument names like 'card_name_translated' by example.
WARNING: you should NEVER use concatenation with clienttranslate, as it would result in a different string to translate at runtime than the one retrieved statically in the translation system, and so translation would not be applied. If you need to compose a string, use substitution and the i18n parameter (but you also have to pay attention not to compose sentences in a way that is dependent upon the English language specific syntax, or it may be impossible to translate correctly in another language: sometimes, you need multiple full sentences rather than relying on substitution).
self::_( "my string to translate" ):
This function returns a string translated in the language of CURRENT user (i.e. player who send the request to the server) (be careful, this is NOT the active player).
Most of the time, you don't need to translate strings on server side, except on the following 3 situations:
- When throwing an exception because the player did a forbidden move.
// This will display a translatable red message to the player that just did some wrong action:
throw new BgaUserException( self::_('You must choose 3 cards') );
// ... notice the use of BgaUserException that signals that this exception is "expected". In theory, all exception that are expected should be translated.
- In "yourgame.view.php", when creating the labels for the game interface used in your template (.tpl) file.
$this->tpl['CARDS_FOR_YEAR_2'] = self::_("Your cards for year II");
Nota bene: it is recommended to set translated text in your interface client side rather than use template variables and server translation, so that translation works natively in replays (that don't have server side translations). For simple strings, the framework will handle moving the translation client side, but for more complex strings it may not work. In particular, you should not use server side translation for templates with substitution variables (or use the specific function "gameview_str_replace( $search, $replace, $string )" if not possible otherwise or for old code compatibility). Also, you should never use a "to_translate" class in your .tpl as it is used internally by the framework.
- Eventually, in your material.inc.php, if for example you need to use some string elements in your exceptions.
// In material.inc.php, $this->energies[n]['nametr'] has been created with the self::_() method. Now we can do this:
throw new BgaUserException( self::_("To execute this action you need more: ").' '.$this->energies[$resource_id]['nametr'] );
- Eventually, in your "getAllDatas" PHP method, as the data return by this method is used only by current user.
totranslate( "my string to translate" ):
This function works exactly like 'clienttranslate', except it tells BGA that the string is not needed on client side.
You should not use this function, except on the following cases:
- Statistics name in stats.inc.php
- Option names and option values name in gameoptions.inc.php
On server side - advanced (PHP)
If you want to use translation system in your custom static modules, you will first need to expose the _() function :
class mygame extends Table {
// Exposing protected method translation
public static function totranslate($text) {
return self::_($text);
}
}
Then you'll be able to use this directly in other modules by doing
throw new BgaUserException(mygame::totranslate("Translated error from my awesome module file"));
Notice how the "totranslate" is also used by the static analysis to detect your string. So the following will not work :
$msg = "Translated error from my awesome module file"; throw new BgaUserException(mygame::totranslate($msg));