Hi.
That's a great idea, and I wish you luck!
2 friends of mine, and me, are about to finish Hebrew translation of SQ3.
We've already overcome all the technical problems.
If it's possible to translate to Hebrew, I'm sure it's possible to translate to French, which should be easier.
You might be interested to take a look at
https://github.com/ZvikaZ/HebrewAdventure/ , to see the tools that I wrote for the tasks, and the translation files that we've got.
Currently these tools are tailored-made for my requirements, and even my specific environment; hopefully I will have time someday to make a general tool from them. However, they might help you overcome some of your problems.
Just be aware, that translating the texts in the "Texts" tab of SCICompanion isn't sufficient:
- There are text strings scattered in the scripts files (I have written a script that "export"s them all to a csv file; and another one then "import"s them back from the csv file; then you need to manually recompile in SCICompanion).
- There are texts drawn as pictures, in various "view"s
- You you'll probably need to modify the fonts, as you've already discussed
- The vocabulary by default needs to be 7 bits, I've overcome that problem with some hack, that probably works only in ScummVM, and not in Sierra's original interpreter (i.e., no Dosbox)
- There are items that are single word in English, but might be two words in French. I will give a Hebrew example - there is no word as 'anemometer' - it's called 'wind meter'. So, you need to take care of that.
- Furthermore, in Hebrew the grammar rules dictate to say "meter wind" instead of "wind meter", so I had to edit the grammar rules file, to make it aware of the Hebrew grammar.
- I also had to take care of the Right to Left display, instead of Left to Right - but that's no problem for European languages.
- There might be more issues, that I don't remember now...
All these issues can be solved, if you're ready to learn and investigate...
It'll be also easier to have some help from other French speaking Sierra fans who want to collaborate on this.
BTW,
First I built scripts that exported various things to csv file; then we created a Google Docs sheet with all the csvs, and the translation was done over there - it's much easier, allows collaboration, history, and more user-friendly for non-programmers; then I wrote a scripts that "import_all" (it's its name, IIRC), that downloads everythings from the Drive, runs the different "import" scripts, prompts to recompile in SCICompanion, and then copies the compiled files from SCICompanion.
I hope that you'll enjoy your Translation Quest!