Dutch (NL) language pack available — MultiLanguage_NL

[Kenneth-Audenaert]

Hi Ruben,

I've built a Dutch (Nederlands) language pack for MultiLanguage and would love to discuss getting it included as an officially supported language, similar to the German, French, and Spanish packs.

Motivation

My wife and I are avid WoW players, and our dyslexic son would love to join us. However, reading English quest texts is a real barrier for him. That's why I built this language pack with Dutch translations and — crucially — Text-to-Speech support, so he can listen to quest texts being read aloud in Dutch. This makes the game accessible for him in a way that text alone can't.

What it includes

• Quests — full Dutch translations (descriptions, objectives, completion text)
• Items — 28,000+ translated item names and descriptions
• Spells — 340,000+ translated spell names and descriptions
• NPCs — structure in place, translations in progress
• TTS — optional Text-to-Speech support with pre-generated Dutch audio (via Piper)

How it works

Translations are generated using Opus MT (Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-nl) with a WoW-specific glossary to preserve character names, locations, factions, and other proper nouns. The addon follows the same structure as your existing language packs (MultiLanguage_DE, etc.).

Additions to the base addon

• "Always show" interaction mode — The default hover interaction mode causes the translation frame to disappear when the mouse moves away, making it impossible to click the TTS playback button. The "Always show" mode keeps the translation frame persistently visible, which is required for TTS to be usable.

Repository

https://github.com/Kenneth-Audenaert/MultiLanguage_NL

The repo contains:

• The addon itself (Lua files, database)
• The translation pipeline (tools/precache.py) and server (tools/server/) so translations can be reproduced and updated
• Audio files are excluded from the repo due to size (~3.7 GB) but can be generated with the included tools

Questions

• Would you be open to adding Dutch as a supported language on the main MultiLanguage page / CurseForge?
• Is there anything I should change to better align with the existing language pack structure?
• Would the "Always show" interaction mode and TTS button be useful to add upstream, so other language packs could also support TTS in the future?

Thanks for building MultiLanguage — it's a great addon!

Kenneth

[rubenzantingh]

Hi Kenneth,

This looks amazing, thanks for putting the time and effort into creating it! I'll have to check it out to see how it works in-game as well. Currently I don't have a lot of spare time so I hope to be able to check it out this week.
I don't plan on supporting TTS, also due to the file sizes, so that won't be included in the core addon. I do like the "Always show" interaction mode. If that works well, I would like to add that so users without the Dutch language pack can benefit as well.

If I don't run into anything, how would you like to proceed with this? I can simply link from the CF and Github README to your repository. You can also try and create a CF project for it so users can download it through the app.

Thanks again!

Ruben

[Kenneth-Audenaert]

TTS:
TTS is not a requirement for the addon, it just supports it if the audio files are present.

e.g. qnumber.ogg is present in the audio folder.

if the audio file is not present and you click the TTS button ingame, you will get a chat message that that particular quest audio file is missing

File size:
none of the actual audio is included with the addon (not present in my repo either), it needs to be generated by the user on their own device, if they so desire.

Next steps:
As this is my very first attempt at publishing something on github, I don't know / understand yet how this is normally handled.
I now know how to commit/push to my own project but that is about it.
I'll continue updating the addon to my repo with improvements.
e.g. I play with the addon enabled myself to experience any weird translations/functionality first hand, to be able to try and fix them when I encounter them.

Linking seems fine in that respect.
Making a copy of it to include it with the other languague packs you have already published is fine for me too. (not sure how that would keep track of potential updates that I add)

How would one go about creating a CF project? is it as simple as creating an account on CF and uploading the files / linking to github?

Kind regards,

Kenneth

[Kenneth-Audenaert]

created a CF project, pending review ...

[rubenzantingh]

Let me know when it gets approved, I'll include the link in a separate section of the addon description, similarly to how the other languages are displayed. Have patience, for me it took a while for it to get approval.

I've just tested the addon and it seems to be working well in terms of cuntionality. However, there are a lot of entries that aren't translated. When trying this on a character who's in currently in Pandaria, I got more English entries than Dutch ones.

Also, I must notify you that I am no longer able to scrape data due to Wowhead policy changes. That means that, unless something changes, this might be the final version of the addon in terms of its database.

[Kenneth-Audenaert]

CF addon is approved: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/multilanguage-nl

Can you give me some quest-ID's? That way I can look into it more focused rather then combing through the entire quest dataset.

I'm OK with the state of the scraping.