mdqp: The Enhanced edition is officially subtitled, right? Could that possibly speed up the addition for the languages still missing the subtitles (I am specifically interested in the italian ones)? Does anyone one knows who (if anyone) is currently working on the subs? I can play the game in english, and subtitles aren't vital to me, but they are certainly convenient, and from what I heard of the italian dub, it's actually pretty good!
The answer I currently have, is that this is the plan, but I'm not sure how fast it can be done.
Here's the gist: Nightdive reached out a few weeks prior to release and we made a deal for the use of subtitles. We offered our subtitles English, French and Spanish, made by the ScummVM team and members of the ScummVM community for use in the Enhanced Edition, and they offered subtitles for the remaining two languges (Italian and German). And to credit us properly -- which is unfortunately currently not true and will be fixed in an upcoming patch.
Our subtitles are made by first transcribing the audio from the official localized releases. So the English one matches the English audio, the French matches the French one and the Spanish matches the Spanish one. This is kind of important to clarify because the localized audio for French, Italian, German, Spanish (FIGS) may differ at a few parts from the English one, and furthermore sentences in a dialogue may be broken or merged differently. It also means that if we ever support (and I aim to at some point) mixing subtitle languages with different audio language in the original game, then extra work would be required to at least address any such special cases than can be practically addressed.
Now, we do have the Italian and German subtiltes courtesy of Nightdive since yesterday, but at a quick glance it seems (to me) that they be translations of the English subtitles. This means that they would work if used with the English audio version, but they will be inconsistent (at least in a few places) with the Italian and the German audio. Some additional editing is also required.
So I think the current plan is to merge them in a bundle soon-ish, and then somehow inform the community members to playtest and report issues so that we can optimize them. Personally, I don't speak Italian, and my German are very basic so I can't help much other than resolving technical issues and updating according to feedback.