For the last month I have been working to make Naval Hurricane localizable and finally added the Russian localization.
Unfortunately, I don't know other languages, so at first it will be the only officially supported language other than English.
Just in case if anyone wants to contribute to the translation into other languages, I've very optimistically created Google Spreadsheets for the five remaining major Steam languages:
And here is my Russian translation as an example.
If the translation percent for a language will reaches 50% completion for the ‘Glossary’, ‘UI’ and ‘ShipParts’ pages, I will add it to the game as a ‘Community translation’. I don’t want to declare a language support and then get a bunch of bad reviews complaining about the quality of the translation. Therefore, these translations will not be listed in the list of official translations on the game's Steam page, but will be mentioned in the description. Closer to the full release, when the strings set of the game will no longer change, I will try to validate the translations with 100% completeness and add them officially if everything is fine.
Translation guidelines
The locale spreadsheet consists of several pages. ‘Status’ and ‘Font presets’ are pages that don't contain strings for translation, so they are locked. The rest of the pages contain a ‘Local’ column, where translators should type the text corresponding to the English text in the ‘Default’ column.
The page names seem self-explanatory.
In many rows, you can see constructions similar to ‘{0}’. They are placeholders for dynamic data, usually numbers with unit names. In the translated string, they should not be changed or deleted. They also can’t be duplicated. I tried to describe the data these placeholders are for and give an example of usage in the ‘Comments’ column.
Text strings of the ‘Glossary’, ‘UI’ and ‘ShipParts’ pages are often used in the limited space of UI elements, so it's best to be concise when translating them.
In some rows of the ‘UI’ page, the text must be explicitly multilined to avoid too long single line strings in the game's UI. For those not familiar with Google Spreadsheets, the keyboard shortcut for a new line in the same cell is CTRL + ENTER. I tried to appropriately mark these rows in the ‘Comments’ column on the ‘UI’ page. In the ‘Help’ page, new lines correspond to paragraphs and lists, so it is obvious where they should be used.
The ‘Help’ page also has numerous tags. Some tags are for the text styling only, such as the tag. But other tags work as hyperlinks to other help topics. For example, ‘Artillery turrets’ in the text becomes a hyperlink to the topic of the artillery turret module in the UI. Thus, translators should write the translated version between the tags and leave the tags intact. For example, the Russian version of the above string would be ‘Артиллерийские установки’. The number and location of tags is not strict, so they can be freely used in the text.
Since the game is in development, new strings will obviously be added. But it is possible that existing English strings will change, so I will have to remove the corresponding translated strings. The largest amount of text that needs to be translated per cell is on the ‘Help’ page, so I decided to lock is temporary to avoid translators doing a spare work. I will unlock it when the game text becomes more stable.
