Help with new locale: Scrabble3D Scottish Gaelic gd

Hi folks,

We'd like to localise Scrabble 3D into our language (Scottish Gaelic, gd) - I've looked around for a guide to localisation but still not entirely sure.

If I understand correctly, a large part of the job is to translate the .lang file? Also, what options are there to do plural formatting in this game as Gaelic needs 4 plural forms.

Beyond that, there's also the question of letter graphics (for the to date unsupported letters) and statistics which I don't know how they're handled (our language doesn't have a card version of Scrabble). We have stats for letter frequencies which I did for a dice-based version of Scrabble, hopefully that should help.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - English or German is fine with us.

Cheers

Dear akerbeltzalba,

Welcome to our Scrabble3D Forum!!! This is really a great idea! Awesome!!! Phantastic!!!

Let me explain to you:

If you translate the *.lang-file to Scottish Gaelic, you will only see the interface of the program in Gaelic language, which, however would be great!
But if you want to play Scrabble3D in Gaelic, too - which I think you want to do! - you need a Gaelic word list, a gaelic.dic, to be loaded in the program!

About the special Gaelic letters we can surely help you! Everything is possible in Scrabble3D!


A free Gaelic word list to start with can be downloaded from here:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki..._.28Scotland.29

That's the Open Office spellchecking list! But we don't know anything about the quality of that list yet, nothing about the inflected forms, nothing! We only know that for example the Hungarian or the Latin Open Office spellchecking list contains so many words that are not valid in Scrabble (names for example), that it will absolutely be necessary to work on that list in order to improve it and make it suitable for playing Scrabble3D.


Since I have worked a lot with Scrabble3D localization and know (nearly) everything about how it works, I would be very very pleased if I could help you!

I will start a separate forum for Scottish Gaelic, where we could discuss (in English or German language) all the questions you have.



Yours sincerely,
Bussinchen


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PS:

Let me ask you: Do you have Skype?
Look here in my profile --> u252490_Bussinchen.html (in German)

As far as I can see in your Twitters, there are not so very special letters in Gaelic language, only normal accents like in Italian:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic_alphabet

Is it really necessary to have letters with accents in Gaelic Scrabble? In Hungarian, yes - but in Italian or French, for instance, no letters with accents are ever used in Scrabble.

Please have a look on the Dutch Wikipedia site, where you can see different international letter sets (unfortunately not the Gaelic one).

Maybe the Scrabble board game does not exist in Gaelic language at all? So Scrabble3D would be a phantastic possibility for you to play in Gaelic finally, and it would really be great if you could help Scrabble3D to be more international by working on gaelic.lang and gaelic.dic files!

Oh sorry, I had forgotten to put the link to the Dutch Wikipedia article about Scrabble! I apologize!

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble

Hey, thanks very much, that's the most enthusiastic response I've ever had regarding a localisation project :)

I forgot to mention that I have several dictionary files from my work over on Open/LibreOffice and Mozilla, so yes, that's not a big problem as long as I know what the upper word limit is. The place name issue is much less of a problem in Gaelic as a lot are composed of common nouns but good point, we'll have to do some cleaning.

You're right about the alphabet in the sense that apart from the grave accent, there are no "special characters". But the problem is this: Gaelic historically used a dot above consonants to show a shound change, for example c was /k/ but ċ was /x/ (like German ch). So these were, from the Gaelic point of view, single letters. At some point (I won't go into the reasons) the dot was replaced with an h. Because these sound changes are very common, that statistically makes h one of the most common letters. There's also another problem in that certain other combinations are seen as single units such as ll nn rr and ng.

We thought of Scrabble some years back but decided to go with something similar to Yahtzee but with letters to begin with. We tried the simple approach of using single letters but it just turned out to be very unwieldy. We either needed too many dice before we could make any decent words or we could make only very few words. But once we said, hey, let's just go with the way Gaelic thinks the letters are sorted, it worked a lot better and we found that with 7 dice, we could do a lot of words.

Not counting the "specials", Gaelic only uses 18 letters anyway, so it's either
a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u + à è ì ò ù (23)
or
a b bh c ch d dh e f fh g gh l ll m mh n nn ng o p ph r rr s sh t th u + à è ì ò ù (34, although we dropped fh and ph cause they're too rare)

As English has 26, that's only marginally more.

We could contemplate dropping the accented vowels but initially, I'd rather not. Minority languages are very sensitive to dropping stuff like that. But we can revisit that, if needs be.


PS: don't worry about having missed the link, I know Google is my friend ;)

We'll continue tomorrow! Good night!


PS:
Gaelic letter set