I’ve done some volunteer work for the team that has been porting Elder Scrolls Online to Spanish: http://www.cervanteso.org.es/
They just looked at the localization binary file format and built a drop-in replacement localization for Spanish. IIRC the developer added a client config option to optionally point to a custom localization file for advanced users. It works well.
I’ve been getting back into EVE Online and was wondering if a similar thing would be feasible here. I’ve tried searching this issue various times, but people generally are asking if CCP can add support for $lang while I’m asking if the community could work on its own $lang localization. I certainly can understand why CCP can’t support every language, and this is the sort of thing the community can solve.
Of course, for this to be feasible:
- There would need to be external localization files (rather than inlined into the game executable) with a sane mapping structure – usually is the case if a game already supports more than one lang such as EVE.
- We would have to know the file format (in case it’s, for example, an exotic ad hoc binary format)
- Ideally the client would support additional localization files (though sometimes it’s possible to swap out one of the existing localization files, like overwriting the Russian localization with a custom Spanish localization).
I know that such a project is a ridiculous amount of work – believe it or not some of us consider this fun. Curious to know if any of these bullet points pass the test.
Thanks.