Tools and Practices - Tiny-Foxes/OutFox-Translations GitHub Wiki

Tools

Translating can be boring and tedious. Sometimes it's hard to locate & remove lines that shouldn't be there or find missing ones. Because of that, translators themselves create tools to make our job easier and faster.

Translation Toolkit

Translation Toolkit is a tool made by Ksempac to help remove lines that are not needed anymore, warn about lines that are missing, check your progress, etc.

This project is intended as a small application to automate some tasks for translators.

It is able to parse, analyze and fix the StepMania translation files.

Stepmania-TranslatorViewMaker

Stepmania-TranslatorViewMaker is a tool made by Snil4.

Have you ever tried to translate a program like StepMania and wondered "Hmm, now where can I find that line in the .ini?" Now there's no need to wonder! This program will make a translator view file for your translation .ini and make you translation job easier.

Tiny-Webini

Tiny-Webini is a tool made by zerinho6 to help with translations of the Project Moondance Website. While not used to translate StepMania (unless SM themes adopt HTML in the future), it uses the same translation system as StepMania. It makes less HTML code or none at all being necessary to translate the website.

Translate Project Moondance with the same style StepMania uses for its translations.

Best practices

Be constant with your words

When doing a mention to "Steps", ask yourself: is it clear which "type of Steps" you're referring to? We have the following "types of steps":

• Steps, which means the notes inside of the chart or the note count.
• StepDifficulty, which means the difficulty selected of the chart, such as Novice, Expert, Hard.
• Step, which means the action of stepping in the pad or a single note.
• StepType, which means the quantization (timing/color) of the note (e.g. 4th = red, an entire beat; 8th = blue, half a beat; etc).

An good example of bad implementation is inside Simply Love Music Wheel screen, where you see "Steps" being mentioned as Steps Count as well as Steps Difficulty, making players confused. Take a look at the bottom left of the screen.

SoundWaves does not have this issue as it says "Taps" instead of Steps and directly says the difficulty.

Reload translations

Imagine you're editing the SoundWaves ScreenCaution and want to see how the translated string looks. You don't need to restart the entire game to see the changes, here's what you should do instead: Exit the screen you just translated, reload the metrics (Shift + Insert; or Shift + F2 on older StepMania versions) and enter the screen again.

Some themes might have a problem where not all strings are updated when metrics are reloaded due to how they are made. In that case, unfortunately the only option is restart the game.