A fair warning: this guide is going to assume you have already read and had some success with my previous guide, Step By Step: Making a Mod. If you haven't, atleast give it a read-through so you can understand the basics that I skip here.

So, to start, as I have said before, you will need the proper tools. A .scm writer will be required and something that can reliably read charts will also be needed. For this, I will be using Racket[racket-lang.org] and Google Sheets[www.google.com], both of which are free, and neither are a large download, if you do decide to download them. My previous guide will help to familiarize you with Racket, and Google tends to be pretty good at making their stuff user-friendly. If you want to use other programs, that is your choice, just know, thing may not always work out at 100%.

Before you go farther, it is HIGHLY recommended that you download the example Spainish Translation mod on the workshop. It will include everything you will need here, plus plenty of its own explainations.

To get started, your mod folder will contain a few things. To start, in the folder itself there will be a folder named "language" (ignore the " "), a main.scm, a manifest.scm, and your preview.jpg. In pure translation mods, i.e. ones without additional code for objects ect., create the main.scm and then leave it blank. Fairly simple. The manifest.scm in translation mods looks fairly similar to that of regular mods, but with a few additions. Lets take a look at the code of the Example Translation's manifest.scm:


Thankfully, you don't need to understand Spainish to understand this code. Lets start with the first similarity: (require mods.scm). Just like with regular mods, leave this alone and let it do it's thing. Next, with have the manifest and its parts. Leave the (manifest alone.
name: This is what the player will see. It serves no code based purpose (to my knowledge), so call it what you wish.
description: This is also what the player sees. It will be labeled as the description for the mod. What is in the Workshop as the description can be different, if you care to make it so.
language-code: This is the ISO 639-1 code for the language you are translating to. A list of languages in can be found at Wikipedia[en.wikipedia.org] or Mathguide[www.mathguide.de].

For both the name and the description, it is likely preferable that they are in the language you are translating to. The users of the mod will thank you.

After you have done this, feel free to go ahead and add the preview image of the mod to the folder. This is not required, the image can be anywhere in the mod upload interface, but it could help with organization.

Probably what you were looking for this entire time, let us start talking about actually starting some translation. In your mod folder, you should have your language folder. In there, you should place a folder named your ISO 639-1 code. In there, you will have two files: dict1.tsv and dict2.tsv. These are two quite large charts of information. Opening them in Google Spreadsheets will allow you to view all that they have. Lets start by talking about each column and what to do with it. For the purpose of explanation, these columns will be out of order. DO NOT edit them in the order they are listed, but instead in the order of their labels. Here we go:

Column 1: This is the column with the string key and must be left alone. There are very few circumstances in which this is a useful thing to mess with.
Column 3: This is the column in which the date that the string was added is held. Use this to find the most recent additions when updating.
Column 4: This is where the English version of the text is stored. This is what you will want to translate, as this is what the player sees.
Column 2: This is where the translated version of the text is stored. Here is where you place your translations.

P.S. Although I do not know if problems will arive if you do this, avoid using more than one language in one mod.

Once you have done all the translating you would like on BOTH of the files (each has a different set of things to translate), download the completed charts. In Google Spreadsheets, do download as > tab seperated chart. The files you recieve will need to be named appropriately and placed back into the folder that you created named as your code. Finally, go into the game, with the translation mod in your mods folder, and see if it worked. If it did, follow the steps put out in my past guide on how to upload. Once your done, congrats! You just helped to improve the community of Galactology. If you know more than one language, and a translation doesn't already exist for that language, do everyone a favor and make another mod! Something else you can do is, after getting the mod maker's permission, create a mod that is a translated version of the original. Don't forget to get their permission though! Have fun playing the game!