This repository contains all the text used by Hearthstone Access.

The en-US locale represents American English and is the only officially supported language. However, people are encouraged to contribute translations for their native languages so they can be included in Hearthstone Access releases.

All text for a given language lives in a file called ACCESSIBILITY.txt under the folder for that locale. Using American English as an example, all text would live under en-US/ACCESSIBILITY.txt.

In order to localize Hearthstone Access into a new language, the easiest way is to start with the en-US file and simply translate the text.

In order to test the translations themselves, you can copy the edited file into your Strings folder in your Hearthstone installation directory. Under a normal American English Hearthstone installation, this would mean copying the file to C://Program Files (x86)/Hearthstone/Strings/enUS/ACCESSIBILITY.txt.

Hearthstone Access uses the already existing Hearthstone's translation system. Under this system, each piece of text consists of:

Key Value Comment.

Note that there's a tab between the Key, Value and Comment. Each entry should also end with a newline character.

For static text, all that's needed is to provide the exact value for the key, with an optional comment. This would look something like:

ACCESSIBILITY_WELCOME_TO_HEARTHSTONE Welcome to Hearthstone Optional comment

Note the tab spaces in between the Key, Value and comment.

For dynamic text, users should write the static text around placeholder elements. Placeholder elements are numbers inside curly brackets such as {0} and {1}. As an example:

ACCESSIBILITY_PRESS_KEY_TO_START Press {0} to start 0=key e.g. Press Enter to start

In this example, {0} will be replaced by the game with the correct key. Note that the en-US file specifies what every number represents in the number, often providing examples in more complex phrases.

In some cases and languages, a given text may require different variations depending on whether it refers to one or multiple entities. Using an example:

ACCESSIBILITY_GAMEPLAY_YOU_START_WITH_N_CARDS You start with {0} |4(card,cards) 0=number of cards

In this example, the word card is used if {0} is 1. In all other cases, cards is used instead. This is accomplished by prefixing two comma-separated words inside parentheses with the special character |4 - a vertical bar followed by the number 4.

Note that in some cases, the distinction between singular and plural is not dependent on the number. For example, the phrase was silenced has a were silenced counterpart, and both need to exist. In these cases, you will find two different keys such as ACCESSIBILITY_GAMEPLAY_DIFF_ENTITY_BECAME_SILENCED and ACCESSIBILITY_GAMEPLAY_DIFF_MULTIPLE_ENTITIES_BECAME_SILENCED.

As with all text, contributors are advised to read the American English file first in order to get familiar with the system.

Some languages make use of gender nouns. However, due to the huge amount of cards that exist today, there are no plans to support gender nouns anytime soon. If your language requires gender nouns in dynamic text, please try to work around it using phrases that don't require them as much.

Using ordinal numbers as an example, you can simply configure them so they read as normal digits and configure any text that uses them as if it were refering to Raid Leader number 1 as opposed to First Raid Leader.

The file includes a few special keys which are used to format various text strings. These entries begin with ACCESSIBILITY_FORMATTING_ and the provided comment in the en-US file should provide clarity on what they do.

The file includes a special key which can be used to override how certain keyboard commands are read. These keys begin with ACCESSIBILITY_INPUT_KEY_OVERRIDE_. For example, in the en-US file, you can find:

ACCESSIBILITY_INPUT_KEY_OVERRIDE_A eh Optional. Overrides the A key to be read as eh by TTS

Note that this may not be needed depending on the language or speech synthesiser you happen to be using.

If you're not familiar with git or have any other questions, you can find someone able to help in the #localization Discord channel on the Hearthstone Access Discord server.