This document explains how Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is translated. If you would like to contribute to the translation process, visit reactivedrop_translations on GitHub.
Most of Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's translations are stored in files read by ILocalize, such as closecaption_english.txt or reactivedrop_schinese.txt. The game loads the English translation first, then whatever language is selected in Steam, for all of these files from all enabled addons. A list of supported languages can be found in the Steamworks Partner documentation.
However, Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop loads these files differently than other Source Engine games. We use a full KeyValues parser, rather than the simplified one in localize.dll, and our file reader can handle UTF-8 (with or without BOM) as well as the standard UTF-16LE.
There is only one pool of translation tokens—that is, tokens in closecaption_german.txt cannot overlap with tokens in reactivedrop_german.txt or basemodui_german.txt without overriding each other.
The # character is removed from the start of tokens, and tokens that start with [english] are ignored by the game (they are used by the translation synchronization tool to know if a string's original value has changed).
The statsweb files use formatting syntax from Go's fmt package, but most files use Source Engine's string formatter, which uses %s1 for the first placeholder, %s2 for the second, and so on.
Text shipped with Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop that is not stored in one of the token files described above is generally stored with one language per file. For example, scripts/asw_credits.txt is loaded by default, but can be overridden by scripts/asw_credits_russian.txt if the game's language is set to Russian. Mail and news files use the _english version of the file as a fallback. All three of these file formats are VDF-based (KeyValues).
"Credits"
{
// All keys are optional, but MUST be in this order.
// This is the default; if you wish to hide the logo, set this value to 0.
"show_credits_logo" "1"
// This is the default. Other than Jacob's Rest, all content should use its own logo.
// Whether that is a campaign-specific logo or a developer's logo is up to that developer.
// Path is relative to materials/vgui.
"custom_logo" "../console/valve_logo"
// Each line of the credits is listed as follows. The key name isn't actually checked,
// but it should be consistent in case it is ever checked in the future.
"asw_credits_" "Line 1"
"asw_credits_" "Line 2"
// ...
}
Both mail and news items are limited to 4 paragraphs. If you need more space, you can insert line breaks into your strings, but splitting a long message into multiple emails or news items or editing it down is preferred.
"News"
{
// The headline of the news article.
"Headline" "Example News Article"
// The date of the news article is in MM/DD/YY format for English.
// Check existing translations for other languages for their format.
"HeadlineDate" "12/15/52"
// There can be up to 4 paragraphs in a news article.
"Paragraph1" "First line of text."
"Paragraph2" "Second line of text."
}
"Mail"
{
// PDA belongs to Example Person
// inbox
"MailFrom1" "From: Coworker Name"
"MailDate1" "Date: 12/19/52"
"MailSubject1" "Subject: First inbox message subject line"
"MailBody1A" "First line of text."
"MailBody1B" "Second line of text."
"MailBody1C" "Third line of text."
// sent mail
"MailFrom3" "To: Coworker Name"
"MailDate3" "Date: 12/19/52"
"MailSubject3" "Subject: First sent message subject line"
"MailBody3A" "First line of text."
"MailBody3B" "Second line of text."
"MailBody3C" "Third line of text."
"MailBody3D" "Fourth line of text."
// Mails 1 and 2 are in the inbox, 3 and 4 are in sent mail.
// Dates use MM/DD/YY format in English.
// There can be up to 4 paragraphs in each email.
}
Some translated text is not part of the game. These files are manually uploaded or copied by project admins, and generally consist of a template file that gets copied and translated to each langauge.