How to translate The Settlers II

So, you are interested on bringing The Settlers II Gold Edition localized to your language? You’ve come to the right place! On this page we cover all the files you need to touch and go through some of the limitations. I’ll also give tips on how to do the actual translation work so that you localize the game instead of simply replacing English words with equivalent words from a dictionary.

Locating the files

Here we assume you are basing your translation off of the English version which is more common than the German one. There is a difference between them: the German one uses .GER extension on the language files while the English, French and Polish language versions use .ENG extension.

The main language files are located in DATA\ONLINE, DATA\TXT, DATA\TXT2, and DATA\TXT3 directories. These can be split to two groups: ONLINE and TXT2 contain plain text files you can open right in a text editor such as Notepad. The two other directories instead contain files which are in a special string tables format, and require a more specialized tool. We’ll get back to that.

Limitations

The biggest limitation to creating a translation for the game is that we do not have a font editor. This limits localization mostly to European languages which use the latin character set. The game predates wide adoption of Unicode which means the game uses an 8-bit character set limiting the maximum different characters to 256. The character set from the game is known as Code Page 437 (CP437).

Here is a table of the complete character set, however the game’s font does not include all the characters of it. The two first rows are not available and some of the other special characters may also be unavailable. However all the letters should be available so you can check from the table below if the desired letters outside the English A-Z range can be found.

For a more exhaustive and complete list I recommend having a look at Wikipedia article on CP437. I also recommend checking the section about Internationalization to see which characters are missing. Depending on situation you may have to figure out creative uses of words to avoid issues with unavailable characters.

Overcoming the character set

One of the technical challenges for you will be dealing with the plain text files. You likely must load and save them in CP437 so that letters outside basic A-Z range will appear correctly in the game.

Instead of figuring out how to work with the files in a text editor already available on your system you can try out online tools to help you out. This one appeared to work as expected: CP437 Converter.

The above tool works for files in ONLINE and TXT2 directories. To use it:

1. Open a .ENG file in it using the “Load CP437” button
2. Press “Convert to UTF-8” button
3. Press “Swap In & Out” button
4. Translate the text in the upper “input” text field
5. Once done, press “Convert to CP437” button
6. Check that the output field looks ok and is not missing letters
7. Press “Download Output” and rename the result to be the same .ENG file you opened

You may wish to verify that your changes worked by replacing the original file with the new file and booting up the game.

Translating the string table files

The files within TXT and TXT3 contain multiple entries in one file, so they will take longer to localize. However we do have a tool for this: go to the utilities section of this site and you find Text Utility. It is designed for translating and it handles the CP437 issue for you transparently, so for the most part you can translate strings one by one. The tool also displays the original string alongside your translated one, so you can refer back to it.

Note!
You never need to remove or add strings, only edit them. The add and removal features exist for people who wish to create custom campaign missions.

Tips for localization

One of the bigger challanges of translating is that it is an art of itself. You are not replacing a word for word. Instead you are retelling what is being said using the target language. Words are not important. Understanding and meaning are.

A common mistake is to just really look up words in a dictionary and replace one for the other. There is a known Finnish subtitle for Star Wars where storm troopers are discussion in Death Star and say “it must be another drill”. The translated text does not have the drill in the meaning as in “training”, but instead as the meaning of the tool “drill”.

So always make sure you understand the context when you are translating. Find out where the text you translate is being used in the game. Unfortunately this is not always possible so you will have to do some translations blind. Some error messages are impossible to generate. Luckily these are rather unlikely to occur on modern emulated machines.

You may also consider the tone of the characters. You may need to think “how Octavianus would write into his diary if he was man in my language?” An easy way out is to just use general written language, but there may be room for some creativity on characterization. Would it fit if he sounded archaic?

Some of the help text of the game are visible in the menu dialog where you can access statistics and the other things. Move that window to a corner and open up another window. Now when you hover your mouse over some other buttons you can see help text appearing in the main window. This is a bit unintuitive, but if you’re looking for some strings you can’t find elsewhere this is one good place to check.

One common challenge you may also encounter is limited space. You may have to find shorter word variants or terms to make all your text fit in the visual available space within the game. As a tip mark it up somewhere if you notice you put a longer text to a string field than the original text was so that you will remember to check it.

The maps

It is also possible to translate the map loading screens, but this means you have to change the origina .WLD files in the four MAPS directories. If you want to only translate Roman Campaign and World Campaign then MAPS and MAPS2 will be enough.

You can edit the map names in World Editor and then download the file back in Campaign format.

Note that map names do have length limitations! For campaign maps the maximum length is 23 or 24 characters.

Sharing the results

Once you’re done I’m happy to host your localization here on settlers2.net! However it is a good idea to play with the language a few times and also ask some other native speakers of the language to check it out. The good thing about The Settlers II is that there isn’t an awful lot of text in the game and you should be able to complete it within about a week even if you’re inexperienced in doing translation work. You should prefer taking your time instead of rushing it out as fast as possible.

Also if you have further questions or need clarification I can try to help out. You can reach to me via Mastodon @MerriNet@mastodon.social, and other contact methods are possible via my homepage. Also you can find me on Return to the Roots Discord.

I will also return back to update this article over time as need arises. Upon first time I’m writing this I’m doing a very pure infodump from the top of my head and I might miss something.