From September WOTC is releasing D&D material in Italian, German, Spanish, French

[*Neuro*]

Dear All,

considering that WOTC is directy publishing official D&D material in the a.m. languages, are there any plans to have this material in FGU?

I mean, as italian it would be nice for me to have at least all the books in italian language on FGU. It will also help spreading FGU in european countries somehow.


Are there any future plans about this from Smiteworks?

Check here: https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/expanding-dungeons-dragons

[Zacchaeus]

Interesting. I don't know the answer - that's something Doug and John would need to decide. But it would be a lot of work. Every module would need to be produced from scratch five times and since one can take a minimum of 6 weeks that would be 6 months just to produce one module. Might also depend on what WotC would want as well. And internally I don't know how various things would work like links, class names, spells etc. A lot of that is built into the rulesets. So it may not be possible to fully translate - you'd still need a Wizard rather than Sorcier. And there are probably a lot more things I haven't thought about yet.

[Kimpanter]

If I rembember correctly, with the announcment of the FG Unity Kickstarter there was a big discussion if translations would be possible and that it would not be done because to many keywords were necessery to get things to function within the texts and description.

But take that wit a grain of salt, I could not find the exact thread I belive to remember, so I migth be mistaken.

[Zacchaeus]

If I rembember correctly, with the announcment of the FG Unity Kickstarter there was a big discussion if translations would be possible and that it would not be done because to many keywords were necessery to get things to function within the texts and description.

But take that wit a grain of salt, I could not find the exact thread I belive to remember, so I migth be mistaken.

I think that discussion was more to do with translating things like the text on the top bar of windows and in the character sheet etc. In other words adding localization to Fantasy Grounds itself. It should be possible to translate modules with the exception of things like I mentioned above like class names, race names, skill names etc. Thinks that FG could use internally to do things with. Reference manual text for example should be translatable since it's just text.

[superteddy57]

Localization has been discussed and the brainstorming has begun quite some time ago. It is currently not started due to other projects taking priority.

[LordEntrails]

Localization (allowing for language translations) usually happens by allowing multiple attributes for each field in a database. Meaning in this approach the FG architecture would change so that each field could have one of many database nodes populating it. So an ability entry would have would have an ability name in English, and Italian, and ... Then it would also have a database entry for the value/text of that ability in each language supported. It would then be up to the user to select which language is shown. The engine itself could still parse and act upon the English attributes, but for instance the Italian is what would be shown.

But, not so simple, because if on a character sheet a player were to edit the Italian text of an action, say a sword attack, if the English version was driving the automation, the damage would not be rolled correctly. Not that even that can't be overcome. But you can imagine the complexity and challenges of such.

I do hope SW figures out a way to do it, and that it makes business sense for them to do so. But it will be a project on the scale of lighting and vision.