TWINE game localisation

Question

Do anyone know if it is possible to localise a TWINE game? I’d like to have my interactive stories in all the Scandinavian languages. I also plan to have mp3 spoken narration in each language for non-readers at a later stage. My thought was to maybe have one complete story file per language but it seems like a hard thing to maintain. Do anyone have a best-way of doing this?

Answer 1

It may be possible to localize your Twine game's default UI strings, depending on your story format. For example, if you're using the SugarCube v2 story format in Twine, then there are some SugarCube localizations here.

However, for your story text it's entirely up to you how you handle displaying that based on the user's choices. Again, assuming you're using SugarCube, you might have the user select the language in the beginning like this:

<<set $lang = "EN">>
''Select your language:'' <<listbox "$lang" autoselect>>
    <<option "English" "EN" >>
    <<option "русский" "RU">>
    <<option "українська" "UK">>
    <<option "Türkçe" "TR">>
<</listbox>>

That will give you a dropdown list of language options.

Then, in each of your passages, you would have something like this:

<<switch $lang>>
    <<case "RU">>
        (Russian version of passage.)
    <<case "UK">>
        (Ukranian version of passage.)
    <<case "TR">>
        (Turkish version of passage.)
    <<default>>
        (English version of passage.)
<</switch>>

You could put any non-language based code outside of that "switch" macro.

If you're using something other than SugarCube for your story format, then you'll likely use something similar to that.

Hope that helps! :-)