I saw this reference in the kickstarter and this was your motivation for unicode (good idea). Have you talked to the chinese guys ? Anyway to get them on this site? Add a chinese set of forums and a download for the chinese branch for now? If we get them coming here some will speak english and it might be easier to pass code back and forth between branches or roll them to 1 branch and share what they are doing?
have they taken the game in a significantly different direction?
IIRC there are not any major code changes, they just coded in language support.
Take to user named Konata. This is the only Chinese user on these forums that I know of. It would be nice to have a cooperative chinese/non chinese coder base. But I dont think that they made any major changes except for language. Maybe we could work together with them with tile support (not sure how good they are at coding, but obviously better than us).
As far as I know, the coder edited the source code directly to replace those strings, without actually creating a branch.
The 0.6 release used my work in progress utf8 branch, at that time.
BTW, I’m also Chinese.
would adding a chinese language forum get more chinese to come? The more people we get the more cool ideas we get and the more coders we get.
I think there are already lurkers. Just no one yet would like to admin a board. Laziness I guess.
The translation module is not complete yet, so if someone wants to do a full translation, he still needs to edit the code or finish the string extracting job first.
By the way, it seems yobbo hasn’t been around for a while. 
If I recall he’s the one who extracted current translation files.
Yes yobbo did the majority of the string extraction, it’s not difficult, just very time consuming.
You have to find every string that will be displayed to the user in the code “string” and wrap it in a little macro like _(“string”). Also there is some build stuff you need to do. Once you have the code annotated, you run a script that parses the code and updates the .pot database for the game, then you check that all in, and translaters can use the .pot to update the language-specific databases.
Also you need to refactor the code sometimes to make sure it’s translatable, for example if you break up a message into a bunch of little chunks, it makes it harder to translate. Finally there’s a complication in that the NPC dialog code has a little string templating system, and we might have to do something special to support translating that.
Ideally I’d like to have everyone working on one version, it means less work for everyone. When I looked at the release notes for the Chinese translation it indicated some more changes than just translations, but it’s hard to tell how extensive it was just from a feature list, especially one mangled by google translate.