Multiple languages in the same scene

Wendigo

Hi community, is it possible to use different languages in one scene at the same time? I know the language demo where you have to switch the scene in order to make the locale change take place. But I'd like to create a vocabulary learning game where I need both english AND japanese on screen at the same time. Is this currently possible? When I try to enter japanese characters  it just displays the english letters. Copy & pasting a japanese character just inserts its unicode id.

Scipi

You could try manipulating the TranslationServer in the _ready() function of each node with a translation on it.http://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/classes/class_translationserver.html#class-translationserverSet the locale then get a corresponding message supplied back to you in that language and set up the node with that text.

Wendigo

Thank you for your reply, Scipi. I finally got it working.I had to save the label which should hold the japanese text as a tscn file and replace it by a "spawner" node.In the _ready event I set the locale to japanese, added a new instance of the label node and assigned the translated text from the translation server to it.It is a litte strange though. If I assign the translated text to a label that is already in the scene it just sets the english text but if I print the translated text to the debug console I get the japanese hiragana character displayed.

Adrien

Hi Wendigo,

Could you give a little more detail on how you solved the problem? I have a similar project around Japanese language, and as an amateur game developer I'm really concerned about how easy/difficult it may be to handle Japanese characters in Godot. What I've seen so far was not really encouraging though, so I'd be glad to learn from your experience.

Wendigo

Hi Adrien, you need to create a csv file containing the words/sentences you want to translate. (in the example project it is "vocab.csv") Unfortunately I can't remember how the "vocab.de.xl" and "vocab.de.xl" were created. Maybe someone else can give more information about the topic.

Here is a simple example: filedropper.com/kanatrainer_1

Adrien

Thanks! In fact I was stuck at a more basic level — getting Godot to display Japanese characters — and your message helped me figure it out. I'd followed this tutorial but I'd overlooked the one step where you have to set the character set as "unicode". After that, Japanese characters still have to be copy-pasted, and they still display as unicode... well, code, in the script editor, but once the project runs they're all right.

Thanks again,

Wendigo

That sound interesting. Did I get you right that you are able to create a string in GDscript which contains either English or Japanese letters (the latter as Unicode characters) that get displayed as Kana letters on screen without using the TranslationServer class just by importing the font as "unicode"?

Adrien

Pretty much. The translation thing is really for creating... translations of your game in different languages. I just saw there's a translation example in the demo projects. (I haven't tried to follow the instructions and create my own translations, but I assume that these .xl files of yours were created following these steps...)

I suppose you can display both Japanese and Latin characters using this system — after all, rōmaji scrip is quite common in Japan, so there's no reason why it couldn't be included in a translation.

But what I was after was not really a translation, though that may come (much) later. Just wanted Japanese characters in the default language version. If that's all you need, then just follow the tutorial I linked above (and don't forget to set the character set right when importing the font), set the global font, restart and you'll be done, it's as simple as that. (And of course you can still use "Latin" characters. Anything unicode in fact, if you have the proper font.)

Note that Japanese characters can still only be entered / copied as unicodes in the editor. Copiying a こんにちは！ string will give you dis\u3053\u3093\u306b\u3061\u306f\uff01 in the script editor, which not terribly convenient... But when you start the application it displays all right, so that's the most important.