Multilanguage module problem

[Legacy_Grani]

               

Here's a rather unheard of problem I encounter with the module I'm building.

 

I'm making a module in two languages, Polish and English. I encounter no problems most of the time regarding the displayed language and game version, except for several strange cases.

 

First of all, I've noticed that when I play an elf with a "drow" subrace in my Polish version of the game, dialogues display in English for some reason. Names and descriptions are in Polish, as they should be, dialogues, however, are not. I've actually made a thread a long time ago regarding this issue, but no one seemed to know why this happens or how to fix it. Ultimately, I ended up using "Mroczny elf" subrace for characters played on Polish version, which translates to "Dark elf", the name the drow can be called with, as well (such a subrace does not trigger English dialogues, so everything is in Polish).

 

In other words, I've ultimately found a workaround for the issue, but not the solution. And I believed that I wouldn't need to bother with similar problems again, but I was wrong.

 

When I tried to use a female human character for once during testing (it never crossed my mind that character's gender might cause problems with text display before), I encountered really weird language problems. Names and descriptions were in Polish, as they should be, but the problem with dialogues seems even more bizarre and random than it was in the drow subrace case. Namely, some lines in dialogues display in Polish, while the others in English, with the English ones prevailing rather significantly.

 

I haven't yet checked if that applies to female humans only or to other races as well, but I strongly suspect the latter is the case (language problems are likely to be related to character's gender, no matter the race).

 

However, I think I might have found a pattern explaining which dialogue lines appear in English and which ones in Polish.

It seems that every dialogue line appears in English UNLESS it is a female specific line.

 

Basically, some languages allow the conversation creator to prepare two different lines altogether for both genders, instead of relying on tokens. This is due to the fact that gender-specific variations of some words in some languages (like Polish) are too many to be listed as possible tokens.

There we go. Normally, when a module is in Polish only, the creator only specified two versions of a given line at most: one for males and one for females. By default, if there is no English line written, the game uses a male line when the female one is empty (and that's the case most of the time).

However, it looks like the game defaults to English line whenever it can. So if there is a Polish male line and an English general line, but no Polish female line, a female character will get an English line displayed instead of a Polish one.


In other words, this seems to be a bug in the game itself, and as such, the only way I see of fixing it would be to copy every single Polish male line in every conversation and paste it as a female line.

It would be a lot of work for me, however, since I have already many conversations, most of which are not simple one-liners. It would take me a great deal of time to do so.

 

That's why I'm asking for your advice. Is that the only way or can you think of some other solution? And if not, are there perhaps some mass-edit tools that would allow me to do this with a few clicks instead of wasting hours on this?


Thanks. '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               

Here's a rather unheard of problem I encounter with the module I'm building.

 

However, I think I might have found a pattern explaining which dialogue lines appear in English and which ones in Polish.

It seems that every dialogue line appears in English UNLESS it is a female specific line.

 

Intresting that it is that way with Polish. I've made a bi-lingual module in English and German and had to copy all the German dialog lines for male players to female because if there was no female version in German the English text was shown instead of the German text for male players.

Anyway, unless you have a male AND a female version for each line of dialog that is not English the game will display English dialog instead of the language you want. That's a waste of space, but I don't see what else we can do because this bug isn't going to be fixed.

 

Edit: Later in your post you said that the text appears in English if there is no Polish female line, whereas in the text I quoted you said all the text appears in English unless there is a female specific line.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Grani]

               

Intresting that it is that way with Polish. I've made a bi-lingual module in English and German and had to copy all the German dialog lines for male players to female because if there was no female version in German the English text was shown instead of the German text for male players.

Anyway, unless you have a male AND a female version for each line of dialog that is not English the game will display English dialog instead of the language you want. That's a waste of space, but I don't see what else we can do because this bug isn't going to be fixed.

 

Edit: Later in your post you said that the text appears in English if there is no Polish female line, whereas in the text I quoted you said all the text appears in English unless there is a female specific line.

 

Anyway, I thought this would be the only way. Still, does it have to be done manually or can it be mass-edited?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MrZork]

               

I don't know of a workaround, but what you have described sounds pretty consistent with what Bioware described in their Localized Strings documentation (Bioware_Aurora_LocalizedStrings_Format.PDF). See section 5 of that doc for more details.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Grani]

               

Perhaps that's true. I'll be totally honest, I didn't read it. I simply assumed what would be the logical solution to this.

I already knew that a Polish male line is supplied instead of a female one if the latter is missing when the module is only in Polish.

I assumed that would be the case for multilingual modules (with English) as well, since, to be frank, it makes much more sense.

 

The way it is now, the game defaulting the dialogue to English version instead of Polish male version, is impractical. Not only do builders have to waste time to copy male lines and paste them as female ones, but it's also a waste of space.

 

It might sound like complaining (well, it is, to an extent), but I wanted to explain why I believed the game uses male Polish lines.