Je m’appelle Gehn
We are committed to making our game a multilingual experience. One aspect of that push gathering translations of all text and speeches in Riven, and as we have mentioned before, we have partnered with OHB in order to do just that. If you’re interested in helping translate Riven, check out the project page over at GULP.
Another aspect, however, is the actual implementation of those other languages. We’ve shown you guys the custom fonts being built by Vincent, our in-house typographer, before (Atrus, and some of Gehn), but today we’d like to share his efforts towards multilingual support.
The main problem, of course, would be accents and other characters that were not present in the original game. In order to create these, Vincent printed out a sheet of text using our Gehn font, and then drew in the accents by hand. These were then scanned back in, and used as the basis for what is now in the font.
This is the first of our fonts to receive this treatment, but the Atrus font will eventually have all of these characters as well.
March 26th, 2015 at 11:22 am
It is this kind of attention to detail that will make this project a success. Superb work guys, well done for being so innovative…Fantastic…
March 26th, 2015 at 4:58 pm
if I can get my Modern Hebrew up to par I should consider lending a hand to you guys. Don’t know if any Israelis would be interested in playing the new Riven!
March 26th, 2015 at 5:27 pm
If you guys decide to translate the speech audio as well, please keep in mind that Dutch has two very distinct dialects, the northern Dutch spoken in The Netherlands, and Flemish, the Dutch dialect spoken in Flanders which is the north of Belgium. Most movies that get dubbed get both a Dutch and Flemish version, usually 😉
March 29th, 2015 at 9:04 pm
I was inspecting the game files from the Prison Island demo (no, I’m not going to leak them or upload them or reveal how I got into them or anything) and I was wondering why it contained two Dutch language files. Guess I know now. I also noticed it contained a couple other rather funny language files, though I’m not going to spoil what they are for everyone lol.
The method I used to get into the game files also works on realMyst Masterpiece Edition 😛 but it won’t work in the final realRiven project anyway because of the engine switch.
March 31st, 2015 at 2:02 am
Extracting Unity assets isn’t exactly top secret stuff, there’s a tool on GitHub called DisUnity which does this.
If anyone knows how to *modify* assets though, I’m all ears. I was trying to replace some videos in realMyst ME but couldn’t work out a way.
March 26th, 2015 at 7:08 pm
Amazing. Besides, Vincent is a cool name. 😉
March 27th, 2015 at 3:24 am
Yes, two versions of Dutch! De vlaming in mij komt boven! (This was dutch by the way!). This looks so awesome!
March 27th, 2015 at 1:24 pm
GULP has some translations into Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. What are your plans for non-Latin scripts?
The original Riven was translated into other languages, and some of these have been copied to GULP. Do you have the rights to these original translations?
March 28th, 2015 at 7:12 am
As one the translators of GULP, I’m really happy to see that progress is being made on your side !
Keep up the good work.
March 28th, 2015 at 10:12 am
Honestly I think there are big flaws in the Gulp system. A few adjustment need to be made in order for it to be more efficient and retain actual best translations.
March 28th, 2015 at 8:58 pm
I fully agree. I have found some mistakes in GULP’s original (American English) transcripts of the speeches. I have added comments to those with incorrect wording, but there are still others with typos or inconsistent formatting choices. The other languages are probably in worse condition.
March 29th, 2015 at 9:05 pm
I guess someone who knows the languages will probably have to review them after
March 31st, 2015 at 3:42 am
Remeber that translations are rarely exeact, and usually involve a fair amount of leyway to insure something which is still viable for the orginal constraints.
I can’t remember if someone asked this earlier, but are there plans to redo the character animations for other languages? Or at least the major ones such as German, French etc? Something like that could really avoid having the dubbed feeling you often get.
March 31st, 2015 at 9:57 pm
That would be a massive undertaking… unfortunately I don’t think it’s very likely. :/ Lip syncing is quite hard to get right, even in only one language!
April 2nd, 2015 at 11:17 am
Well, GULP is better than nothing.
Maybe we could organize a skype conference with major translators in order to review the whole translation.
April 2nd, 2015 at 3:06 pm
Don’t get me wrong I love the concept, but several times my translation simply disappeared and the one with huge mistakes was still winning, which is completely absurd and used to get on my nerves. That said, it was in september 2012, I guess the system has been improved since that time. I’m a French teacher and I’m into grammar and linguistics, I work patiently and thoroughly, I really know what I’m doing and I like it, so it can be frustrating when the system is unfair.
March 29th, 2015 at 9:16 pm
I’ll just give this link in case you guys want to have the font used in the Riven title http://www.mediafire.com/download/t2zox2ztjno/Riven301.ttf
March 30th, 2015 at 7:20 am
Is there a way for you to export a list of all used letters to be sure to cover all glyphs?
I played many translated games with missing glyphs: For example “Can?t” instead of “Can’t”, when the translator used the correct ’ instead of ‘. Or even “Can’t” when the text is in utf8 but the game expects latin1. I can’t enjoy those games…
March 30th, 2015 at 11:45 am
Issues like this are exactly why we intend to have a large beta testing period before we launch the game. We definitely don’t want to launch with issues like that!
April 3rd, 2015 at 5:21 pm
Excellent, and beautifully done! I’m also glad to see the inclusion of the special letters ĉÄĵĥÅÅ to support the Esperanto translation. Looking forward to continuing to watch the project progress!
April 5th, 2015 at 2:16 pm
GULP needs more popularity. There are good, finished translations with no votes.
April 9th, 2015 at 5:15 pm
Another GULP question: do you want the word “stop†translated which appears in Catherine’s journal on the drawing of the telescope?
April 12th, 2015 at 12:21 pm
Will the texts for translation spoil the game for me if I haven’t played yet?
April 14th, 2015 at 12:50 am
Most likely, yes! Sorry 🙁
April 14th, 2015 at 1:27 pm
I’M sorry, i could have translated it to Hebrew, if anyone tries and needs any advice, you can contact me (no spoilers though!)