Skyrim quests/items/place names in other languages

Question

I pre-loaded Skyrim through Steam before release date and it has installed by default using my native language (Italian). The translation has a good quality so I decided to keep it and not switch to English.

Now I am encountering some problem when asking for help here because obviously quests but also some items/places names are different.

Are there any files inside Skyrim installation that I can use to understand how English terms have been localized to my language?

I checked the folder structure and found a folder called

\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Strings\

It contains various *.strings, *.DLStrings and *.ILStrings files with promising sizes, but they are encoded in some way and unusable in this state.

Answer 1

Here are some tools to convert the String files:

Check out this site. The Strings File Tool (.requires NET Framework 4) converts the text data files (STRINGS, DLSTRINGS, ILSTRINGS) to CSV format (UTF-8).

The XlsImport tool is for merging the data into a CSV/Excel file for better management. There's literally over tens thousand lines of text data, managing them within multiple sheets helps a bit.

There's some command line involved. Here is a brief explanation of how to use the packer and unpacker:

StringsUnpacker /DL [DLSTRINGS file to unpack] [Output filename and extension] StringsUnpacker /IL [ILSTRINGS file to unpack] [Output filename and extension] StringsUnpacker [STRINGS file to unpack] [Output filename and extension]

The packer works the same way.

E.g., StringsPacker [Filename and extension of data you want to pack] [STRINGS file to pack to]

There's a readme file in each of the two zip files that go into more details (in Japanese, sorry) on the commands and format.

If that's not your thing, try this utility, requires MSVC (chances are you already have this installed).

Answer 2

Take a look in the folder

<Steam>\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Interface

I have Skyrim in English so i can't be sure, but there is a file that is called translation_english.txt there. This file has lots of strings that is translated from english to english. So i imagine that a italian installation would have Italian to English translations.

Answer 3

For translate the menus:

<Steam>\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Interface

For all the history and books:

<Steam>\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Strings

Which this last folder contains very large files. For edit must change the last ".strings" or ".DLStrings" with, for example, "*.txt".