Artophile Translation

Like all content in OMIMO, this interactive story (course) is open, freedom-respecting content that belongs to everyone in the world. Therefore, it’s great to have it in as many languages as possible. All translations are done by volunteers who contact us and offer their help; people like yourself!

If you don’t see the story in your favorite language and would like to contribute its translation, please read this page first to understand the amount of work and the process, and then contact us to make arrangements. Please do not start translating before contacting info@omimo.org because other volunteers may already be working on the same language.

On this page, you will find

• The content that needs to be translated
• Explanations of the translation process

Approach

Some people use machine translation (e.g., Google Translator) to translate everything into the target language and then review the output and make adjustments. Please don’t do that! It never results in a good enough text that the audience deserves.

Amount of work

The translatable content of the story is about 35,000 words, equivalent to about 70 pages of standard text. This is much higher than other content like the OMIMO modules, however, it’s a simple story, and its translation is much faster and easier than the reference content of the manuals.

The general approach

You don’t have to stick to the words and sentences in the story; the only important thing is the meaning behind the words. So, feel free to use any construct in the target language that can convey the meaning in a simple and clear way. If you have any doubts about the meaning of something, let us know, and we can explain it to you.

Translating key phrases

The story uses many of the key phrases used in OMIMO modules, such as the names of documents. When those phrases are already translated to the target language, please use the existing ones for compatibility with the manuals.

Translation packages

The following are the latest source files of the existing languages for this story:

• български
• Deutsch
• ελληνικά
• English
• Español
• فارسی
• Français
• Nederlands
• Română
• русский
• Slovenski

You can use any language as your primary source and create the files for the target language. You may be able to use a second or third language for inspiration as well.

Please do not change the file names, as they are used to address the files in the system.

Future adjustments

You can always adjust your translation in the future, but don’t rush into delivering your translation with questionable quality just because you can adjust it in the future.

When you need to make adjustments, please don’t use your original files, because the files you’ve sent us may have had technical problems, and our team has fixed those problems. Instead, do one of the following two:

• When there are not many changes, send us an email like “change … to …”.
• When there are many changes, come here, download the current source files of your languages, adjust them, and send them back to us.

Software for editing text files

The translation packages contain multiple “txt” files. If you insist, you can open the plain text files in a word processor in an office suite like LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, or Google’s Office. However, the best way is to use a text editor. The following are some examples you can use, all free and open source:

• Xed (Linux, Windows, macOS)
• Kate (Linux, Windows, macOS)
• Geany (Linux, Windows, macOS)
• Zed (Linux, macOS)
• Notepad++ (Windows)

You can enable spell checking in those text editors as well.

Names and Genders

The names of characters in this story are selected to satisfy two criteria: first, we wanted the names to represent as many nations as possible. Because of this, we don’t recommend changing them to common names in the target language; it’s best to keep the original names and embrace diversity.

The second key attribute of the names is that they are all unisex names because we didn’t want to encourage gender discrimination. To do so, the English text has been written in a way that avoids using “he” and “she”, and there are no genders implied. Depending on the target language, you may have one of these situations:

• The language may not have any form of grammatical gender, in which case, you don’t have to worry about anything.
• There may be only a few gender constraints in the language that you can avoid, similar to English. In that case, you need to put extra effort into keeping the text gender-neutral.
• There may be unavoidable gender marks in your language. In that case, you will have to assume genders for characters. Please make sure they are balanced.

Structure of the course

The course consists of a number of passages. Each passage has some content, such as conversations, followed by one or more choices. Each choice brings the user to another passage. There are about 400 passages in the story. Each passage is in a separate file in the translation package.

This is a sample passage (file):

The top of the file is the content of the passage, and the bottom is the set of choices. Each element in the sample above is explained in the following sections below.

Voice identifiers

The content is what you have on top of the page. Each line starts with a voice indicator, which is one of the following:

• s: status – something about the context (e.g., time or place)
• q: Inner thoughts of the main character
• i: What the main character says out loud
• u: What other people say out loud

Make sure you won’t change those indicators at all.

Choices

On the bottom of each passage you can find one or more choices. Each choice starts with “j-” (short for “jump”), followed by the name of the target passage.

Make sure you don’t change the name of passages because that would break the links. So, for example, “j-approval: " should stay intact in all translations, and you shouldn’t translate the word “approval” because it’s the name of the next passage, and not part of the content visible to the learners. Everything after “:” in the choice is the visible text that requires translation.

The links refer to the names of the passage files, so, make sure you don’t change filenames either.

When translating the choices, please pay attention to the quotation marks: Some choices are about saying things, and those are inside quotation marks. Other choices are about certain responses and actions… something other than what you’d say directly, and those are not inside quotation marks.

Blocks

As you progress, you’ll see a few other constructs, such as:

These are blocks of text that represent emails, documents, etc. This syntax determines their style. There are various types of blocks; “e---” for emails, “d---” for documents, “t---” for mind map trees, “g---” for Gantt charts, etc. As you can imagine, the starting and ending markers (e.g., “e---” and “---e”) should not change in your translation.

The Gantt charts and mind map trees use a number of equal signs at the beginning of each element to determine their hierarchy. The number of equal signs should not change.

Emphasis

Sometimes, words or phrases are surrounded by certain symbols that determine their style:

Lists

Lists are constructed like the following: