Dejarik A.K.A. Holochess--Attention French speakers! Need translation assistance!

I've always been a board game fan, and I especially have a fondness for chess variants.  When my love for Star Wars and chess cross, I find myself fortunate that Star Wars has a chess game: Dejarik.  In high school I tried to invent rules based on the movements shown in ANH, but I never got far.

Several years ago, I found these rules.  Quite frankly, they're rather lame: all movements were based on an inherent number of steps each piece is permitted to take in any combination of directions, and it relies too heavily on luck.  But at least it was something.

http://dhost.info/rissa/Holochess/index.htm

A few years later, I found these.  More interesting, but rather basic, as all the pieces moved in the same manner without variation.

http://zeelay.free.fr/star-wars-artisanal/

As you can see at the second site, the author was writing "advanced rules," but they were not completed.  These were supposed to allow for piece variation, but these rules have been forthcoming since I discovered them in 2007.

But I actually forgot all about this game for some time.  I wrote the author of this page to ask how his rules were coming along, and he told me they were actually done, but only in French.  He suggested I translate them, but I don't speak French, and the online translators are obviously quite limited.  I have here the rules in French he provided me.  I don't believe he would mind if I put them up, since he told me to translate them into any language I knew so he could post it all on his site.  If any French speakers wanted to translate this so we all could enjoy the game, I think that'd be awesome, and in turn I could offer him that translation to post at his site.  Hopefully he's still around, since he sent this to me about four years ago.

http://www.4shared.com/office/_7VrNSS0/Dejarik_une_page.html

I hope someone would want to take a stab at this so all can enjoy it. 

As am I.  I wonder if many people have had equal difficulty divining playable rules from what was presented on the screen.  This version seems the most promising to me at being sufficiently intelligent and strategic while simultaneously matching R2's and Chewie's game.  25 cells really makes it difficult, but this guy may have done it.

Still hoping someone will translate the advanced rules.  This has the potential to be a truly interesting game.

Nooooooooo!!!

Yes, YES, YESSSS!!!!

*maniacal laughter*

*crash of thunder*

I'll see what I can do.

Hey, thanks a lot!  It looks interesting to me, so I'm glad you're willing to give it a try.  Hopefully it is rewarding for you as well :)

Maybe it's my browser, or maybe I'm just being stupid, but is there a way to make it bigger? I can understand a fair bit of it, but to read it, I have to translate the page (with a webpage translator) and hover over the teeny-tiny text to read the French. :P

No problem, I think it's gonna be too much of a problem to translate (I'm a translator, so I think this might help :P), and it should be rewarding indeed :)

To clarify what I said, my browser allows me to translate the page, but I can't read the text because it is too small. However, I am able to hover over the translated text to see the original text (in French) of which I can understand a fair bit. It would be a lot easier to be able to read the translated version, but I can't find a way to enlarge the image/text.

Derp.

I tried [CTRL] + [+] and [CTRL] + Click + [+], but I didn't think of [CTRL] + Scroll. :P Thanks.

Google Translate seems to translate it surprisingly well. I would just go with that and tweak the grammar to fix it up a bit. Translating it from scratch might just be a waste of time.

In that case... I'll see :P

If Google does well, that is good news indeed.  I speak Spanish pretty well, and since French and Spanish both descended from Latin, I was going to try to perform a translation, using Google and the basic rules translation that the author already provided as a reference.  I tried working through it, but though Google was helpful, it was still pretty messy and I got fed up with it and gave up.  But this was back in '07, so perhaps Google has improved their translation software quite a bit since then.  Thanks again for the help, and I'm glad a few more folks are interested than when I first posted this.  Thanks especially to Bewy once again.

Yes, Google Translate has improved enormously in the past couple years. It still isn't perfect of course, but it's good enough that you should be able to use it to translate the page with some grammatical corrections.

Since Bewy is a professional translator, if he's still willing I'd rather let him have the first go at it.  If he decides it's too much trouble, I'll go the Google route.  In reality, there is nothing like a human translator just yet :)

Having read through more of the rules, that might be a good idea. Some parts are good, but others take a bit more work to decipher or could have a couple possible meanings.

I still can do it, no problem :D I have spare time these days I can devote to translating this, je peux traduire ce document mes amis :)

I've begun working on it, but I'll need an English-speaking proofreader (I'm French) when I'm done, if anyone's interested (I'm not done yet so it's not urgent). To keep the original layout without (overly) complicating things for myself I'm translating it with Photoshop, so I can send the PSD to the proofreader :3

I of course would be happy to help with the English :)

To quote Charles M. Burns: "Excellent".

Halfway done (it's not too complicated and is fortunately fairly well written), I should be finished tonight or tomorrow morning; then I'll give it to you for proofreading.

They repeated us so many times "Don't translate towards English" in college... That can be helpful sometimes though :P

Fantastic news!  Once it's translated and proofread, I will send an email to the original designer with your translation.  If you want, you can give me your name so you can get credit for translating.  I haven't written him for years, so I don't even know if his address is still good, but I definitely want him to get as much credit as he deserves for designing workable rules.  It seems like it could be a fun and playable game.

I am curious, what did your instructors mean by saying, "Don't translate towards English"?  I don't understand.