I18N

Silksong.I18N

A Hollow Knight: Silksong mod that automatically loads localized text for other mods.

Translate a Mod (for Users)

To translate a mod, you need to find that mod's translations folder. The translations folder should be in another folder with the mod's name in BepInEx/plugins. If the mod uses I18N, it will have a languages, Languages, or LANGUAGES folder next to its .dll file. That folder should contain one or more .json files named for the languages they define: en.json, fr.json, and so on. The capitalization doesn't matter.

The allowed languages are: en.json (English), fr.json (French), de.json (German), zh.json (Simplified Chinese), es.json (Spanish), ko.json (Korean), ja.json (Japanese), it.json (Italian), pt.json (Brazillian Portugese), and ru.json (Russian). You cannot currently translate a mod into a language that is not one of these unless another mod provides support.

To add your language to a mod, first you need to create your translation file. Copy one of the mod's .json language files (whichever has the most lines) and rename it to your language's two-letter code. If you wanted to translate an English mod to Brazillian Portugese, you would copy the mod's en.json file and rename it to pt.json.

Then, open the new translation file in your text editor (Notepad on Windows) and translate all of the text after the colons (:) on each line of the file. Do not edit the text before the colons (:)! The text before the colons is how the mod knows which line is which.

For example, in the following translation file:

{
    "TRANSLATION_KEY": "Localized text!",
    "CUSTOM_TOOL_NAME": "Super Cool Tool",
    "CUSTOM_TOOL_DESC": "The name of this tool rhymes. How amusing.",
    "SOME_DIALOGUE": "Hi! I’m an NPC…And I’m Hornet.Yay!"
}

You should edit Localized text!, Super Cool Tool, The name of this tool rhymes. How amusing., and Hi! I’m an NPC…And I’m Hornet.Yay! by replacing the text with its translation into your language. You should not edit TRANSLATION_KEY, CUSTOM_TOOL_NAME, CUSTOM_TOOL_DESC, SOME_DIALOGUE, or any of the colons (:), straight quotation marks ("), commas at the ends of lines (,), or the curly brackets ({ and }).

To use your translation in-game, change the game's language (in the main menu) to your language.

Usage (for Mod Developers)

If your mod requires localized text to function, add this as a dependency by adding the following attribute to your mod's BaseUnityPlugin class:

[BepInDependency("org.silksong-modding.i18n")]

Additionally, if you're going to publish your mod on Thunderstore, you need to add this as a dependency in your mod's Thunderstore manifest. To do that, add the following like to your thunderstore.toml file after the [package.dependencies] definition:

silksong_modding-I18N = "1.0.2"

Alternatively, if you don't have a thunderstore.toml file, you can add this as a dependency by adding "silksong_modding-I18N-1.0.2" to the dependencies array in your Thunderstore manifest.json file.

This mod does not need to be added to your project as a reference.

Set a Default Language

You should set a default language for your mod to use if the game's current language isn't supported or is missing translations. The default language should be whichever language is the best supported by your mod.

You can set your mod's default language directly from C# code by adding the System.Resources.NeutralResourcesLanguage attribute to your mod's assembly. To set your mod's default language to English, you could add the following attribute to your mod's source code:

[assembly: System.Resources.NeutralResourcesLanguage("EN")]

Anywhere in the C# code will work, but the recommended location is Properties/AssemblyInfo.cs.

Alternatively, you can define the NeutralLanguage property in your mod's project file. To set your mod's default language to English, you could add the following to your project file:

    EN

Format Strings and Default Language

In some cases, it may be desirable to define a language string of the form {1} {0} to be passed as the first argument of string.Format. This may lead to grammatical issues in other languages; in such cases it may be desirable to use the form {0} - {1}, for example Bellway - Bilewater is less likely to be unnatural in an arbitrary language than Bilewater Bellway which is natural in English. However, if it is desired to preserve the correct order in English, then EN cannot be used as the default language. To accomplish this, the following scheme is recommended:

• Set the default language to an arbitrary language such as DEFAULT.
• Populate default.json with default format strings and English-language text (or any other desired language)
• Populate en.json with only the overridden format strings

Add Localized Text

To add localized text to your mod, create a directory named languages next to your mod's assembly. Inside that directory, you can add files named {lang}.json, where {lang} is the two-letter language code used by the game. Language files are loaded case-insensitively. If your mod is YourName.YourModName, the following file structure would define localized text for your mod in English and French:

BepInEx/
    plugins/
        silksong_modding-I18N/
            Silksong.I18N.dll
        YourName.YourModName/
            YourName.YourModName.dll
            languages/
                en.json
                fr.json

The following language codes are supported by the game: EN (English), FR (French), DE (German), ZH (Simplified Chinese), ES (Spanish), KO (Korean), JA (Japanese), IT (Italian), PT (Brazillian Portugese), and RU (Russian).

The contents of the localized text files are JSON object