Skip to content

Translations

CTLD talks to your players in their own language. Every message the script shows — F10 menu entries, radio calls, status text — goes through a translation layer, so you can pick the language your mission runs in and override any individual string without touching CTLD's code.

If you want the internals (how ctld.tr() resolves a string, how translators maintain the dictionaries, how to contribute a new language), see the Internationalisation guide in the developer docs. This page covers only what a mission maker needs.

Available languages

CTLD ships with four built-in dictionaries:

Code Language
en English (reference)
fr French
es Spanish
ko Korean

English is the reference: it always has every string, so it is used as the fallback whenever a translation is missing.

Choosing the language

The active language is the i18n_lang setting — set it like any other setting, in ctld-tools or by hand in your configuration snapshot:

mm_facing:
  i18n_lang: fr

Valid values are en (the default), fr, es and ko. This is a mission-level choice: it applies to every player on the server.

The legacy selector still works

Older missions selected the language by editing the top of src/CTLD_i18n.lua (ctld.i18n_lang = "fr"), and that still works — CTLD reads the i18n_lang setting first, and falls back to that module global, then to en. Prefer the setting: it needs no source edit and survives a CTLD upgrade.

How fallback works

You never have to worry about a blank or missing message. If a string is absent or empty in the active language, CTLD falls back automatically, in order:

  1. the active language dictionary,
  2. the English dictionary,
  3. the English text itself.

A message is never empty or nil.

Overriding specific strings

You can change any single string from your mission — no need to edit a CTLD source file. Declare ctld.i18n_overrides in your CTLD_userConfig.lua:

-- CTLD_userConfig.lua
ctld = ctld or {}

-- Override specific strings, per language
ctld.i18n_overrides = {
    fr = {
        ["Pack Vehicles"] = "Empaqueter vehicules",
        ["Drop Beacon"]   = "Poser balise radio",
    },
    en = {
        ["CTLD Commands"] = "Helicopter Commands",
    },
}

The key on the left is the English text CTLD uses internally; the value on the right is what players see. Overrides are applied once at startup, on top of the built-in dictionaries. You can override any language independently of which one is active — so you can, for example, tweak the English wording even while running the mission in French.