PC Good News For Chinese/french/russian/spanish Players: Localization For Third Party Dlcs Possible

This is my Chinese Localization Mod for BCC XC&WMR and Birmingham - Crewe, which took me just a couple of hours:
https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/m...ird-party-dlc-simplified-chinese-localisation

The good news for everyone who speaks other languages including French, Russian, Spanish and even potentially Japanese in the future, is that this mod proves that adding localization support for those languages is possible and easy to do (will not take you forever).

In fact though not everyone use Chinese, I'd recommend anyone to try out the source code that I provided to make your own mod for your own language (If you at least know how to use Python and your language is officially supported by the base game), as Alex & Matt have stated that the localization team can't catch up with so many third party DLCs so they're not going to do that.

Monetary cost is 0 as those took me only 150,000 characters in the 500,000 monthly free quota for Google Cloud Translation API for those 2 DLCs. Duration of development is mostly spent on glossary and fixing translations when testing it in-game because the translator is not optimized for railway related words.

 

One has to be careful, trying to do things perfectly sometimes lead to a poor result...
As we use to say in French le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (best is the enemy of the good)...
For example, I've recently seen a cab switch which was named ingame as VACMA...
VACMA (veille automatique à contrôle de maintien d'appui) is the SNCF dead man's device, so that does not suit a British locomotive.
What was done there was in fact an analogy, not a translation.
Which goes to show that being a translator is a profession...

 

I've never seen a automatic translator do analogy, but if it do happens with this workflow it's at least easily fixable, either by forcing this original text to be a predefined result (in glossary) or just do manual replacement works. Technically you can also fix those in-game already existing translation issues with this workflow...

 

Those tools are indeed really useful, but the specific example I was refering to was clearly a human mistake. Anything human can be subject to error. And there are also psychological aspects which come into play, like pedantry.
In this precise case, someone (in charge of the translation) thought "Hey !!! I know that in France, this dead man's device, we call it VACMA, so let's translate it this way"...
Thus there's no need to translate abstruse literature to be off topic...

Don't get me wrong, it's human actions that I criticize first and foremost !

 

Fixed a bit of problem in the pipeline. Anyone wants to have a try?