- Aug 27, 2020
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CSV is a very simple text file format. It's called "comma separated values" and that's precisely what it is - every text line is a row, containing zero or more columns separated by some special character (usually comma - ',' or semicolumn - ';'). It describes a table filled with text, you see.On the other hand, if you want to do some fan translations:
open the .csv files in the system folder. Scene dialogue are in commonSheet and sheet files. Use google docs to open it and you can use some basic google translate commands on each cell (like excel commands) + you need to remove spaces on the character pointer variables. It's not hard to fix the mtl based on context and if you know some japanese words, it's even better. But it's very tedious because there are about ~5k untranslated lines each update. Good thing is with each fix update the untranslated lines get fewer and fewer.
For some reason Google Translate does not support .csv files directly, but it supports popular spreadsheet formats: .xlsx (MS Offile) and .ods (Open Document Spreadsheet). There should be a wealth of programs capable of converting files of these types to each other. From the top of my head, Libre Office Calc should do fine. MS Excel probably too.
So instead of translating every spreadsheet cell directly you can convert every .csv file into .ods, translate them wholly and then turn translated document back into .csv. Maybe you'll want to edit translation result or merge it somehow with the original file before turning it into .csv.
Sanitizing of translated text (like fixing RPG Maker variable substitutions and inserting line breaks at certain length) is not too hard to achieve, but requires custom tooling and, consequently, some programming knowledge on part of the translator.