Hello,

I'm in the early stages of an attempt to translate Skyrim to Persian (Farsi). The major technical hurdle is that Persian uses a right-to-left script (very similar to Arabic).

It's possible to reverse the translations and store them that way in the various translation files, but in-game text is still left aligned, and wrapped text is a nightmare to manually line break (and you can forget about adjusting fonts/sizes after the fact).

In hopes of a better end result, I've managed to integrate an ActionScript function which reverses, wraps, and right-aligns Persian/Arabic into many of the vanilla GUI components, basically altering every .SetText() call or .text assignment required. This allows raw Persian/Arabic translations to be entered into a tool such as TESVTranslator without any tweaking by the translator.

I'm now concerned that this approach, which requires recompiled SWFs of most GUI elements, drastically limits the compatibility of the translated game with GUI-affecting mods, and makes adding translations for additional GUI mods depend on each mod being re-compiled with the custom text parser. Although, this may be an acceptable compromise for a game that (as far as I know) hasn't been translated into any right-to-left language so far (Arabic, Persian and Hebrew among them).

In an attempt to resolve this, I'm trying an alternate approach, which involves using SKSE's RegisterForMenu, OnMenuOpen, and UI.GetString/UI.SetString to get/modify/set all text strings. Unfortunately, my early tests show a quick flicker when menus are shown, with the original text briefly visible before the call manages to change it. I suspect this will only get worse when parsing larger text strings, for things such as help text or books.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a way to implement this without essentially preventing the use of any other GUI mods, while also retaining flicker-free text? Perhaps some way to intercept access to the string translation files, or modify menu text before the menu is displayed?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

PS: If anyone has any evidence of a successful right-to-left Skyrim translation (aside from gdsmth's early work on an Arabic translation), I'd love to hear about it.