Introduction

What is LS-Dialog Editor?

LSDE

: an acronym for

LepaSoft Dialog Editor

, is a tool designed to

assist developers in writing and translating their projects

More than just a simple translation tool,

LSDE

is optimized to allow you to establish an ideal and personalized workflow for each project.

Manual or LLM-assisted text translation.

Manual or LLM-assisted text composition.

Centralized management of dialogues and text strings.

Change tracking and version history.

Automatic detection of inconsistencies or issues.

Support for multiple export and import formats.

Possible integration with external tools (game engines, CI/CD pipelines).

Organization of your project's structure and interface rendering.

Linguistic validation tools (length, constraints, tags, variables).

Real-time collaboration or via shared files.

Generation and synchronization of voice audio narration.

Advanced software customizations for your needs.

How does LS-Dialog Editor work?

LSDE

relies on

i18n best practices

to organize your translation keys.

Without imposing a unique structure, it integrates approaches proven by frameworks to manage linguistic complexities such as contexts and plurals.

The workflow is very simple:

You create a new project.

You define your project folder.

You create keys manually or automatically by scanning your project.

You apply tasks to the keys (translations, corrections, reorganizations...).

The keys

LSDE

employs a hierarchical key system to precisely locate each dialogue.

Example: The key

game:scenes.events.The-quest-of-sun.d1

game:

indicates the namespace.

This name is defined by the name of the translation file, for example:

locales/en/game.json

locales/en/scenes.json

...

scenes.events.The-quest-of-sun.d1

represents the access path to find the dialogue in the file's JSON structure.

json// file game.json
	{
		'scenes': {
			'title': '',
			'description': '',
			'events': {
				'The-quest-of-sun': {
					'd1': '',
				},

			},
		},
	},

LS Dialog Editor caches dialogues in
.lsde
files.

This facilitates sharing and retrieving your projects, thus avoiding sending a set of complex files to your clients.

i18n Key Convention

W3C Internationalization

is the reference that defines i18n as a standard, independently of any software library.

The W3C recommendations define the fundamental rules:

avoid concatenation

manage plurals according to CLDR linguistic rules

manage dates, numbers, and currencies

provide context to translators

separate text from code

provide fallback locales

never assume a length or word order

support RTL writing (Arabic, Hebrew)

Regarding JSON architectural standards and best practices,

ICU (International Components for Unicode)

serves as a reference.

i18next & i18n ?

LSDE

relies on both i18n and certain best practices from

i18next

Specifically for:

folder structure

plural contextualization

support for nesting and variables...

For games

LSDE

supports two types of dialogues for games.

There is no universal "right" approach, but rather tools adapted to each task.

SAD : "Single Actor Dialog"

A single actor per dialogue, generally ideal for action games or games without complex narration.

This means that each key corresponds to a dialogue or a piece of text and must be concatenated and assembled within the game engine.

This approach can introduce a lot of complexity in a narrative game with many interactions between multiple characters, such as JRPGs, for example.

MAD: "Multiple Actors Dialog"

Multiple actors in the same dialogue, identified by tags, ideal for RPGs or games with complex narration involving multiple actors.

This means you will integrate a series of dialogues, separated by tags, which will then be interpreted by your game engine.

This greatly facilitates taking a step back from complex dialogues involving multiple interlocutors, but it's a bit too complex for simple action games, for example.

For WEB

There's no real reason anymore not to translate your website to expose your tool to the whole world.

LSDE

offers a comfortable working environment for developing your web showcase with real-time preview thanks to HMR and i18n libraries like i18next in its React or Next.js versions, for example.

Q: Shouldn't we let extensions handle website multilingualism?

A: Yes and no.

These tools can help out, but they will degrade the UX and UI of your showcase.

They also don't allow for good SEO, unlike a translated website that can be indexed and offered to people searching for content in their native language.

For software

Translating your software and applications is extremely important.

Software development architectures, languages, and techniques are generally much more flexible than those of the web.

That's why

LSDE

offers 100% configurable tools to adapt them to your needs and architecture.

It is regular expressions (regex) that allow for creating a coupling between your architecture and

LSDE

Introduction

What is LS-Dialog Editor?

How does LS-Dialog Editor work?