Matreshka | Russian Language Pack for WoW TBC Anniversary

Matreshka translates World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Anniversary into Russian while the game is running. The official European realms are locked to English: you cannot pick the Russian locale in Battle.net, because with it the realm will not let you in. So the Russian text has to be added on the client side, by an ordinary add-on.

The add-on does not overwrite the game's global strings blindly. It hooks the drawing of windows and puts the translation on top of the finished frame, so the protected interface, the action bar and combat elements are left untouched.

What it translates

• Whole quests: title, description, objectives, progress and rewards, both in the journal and in the quest giver's window.
• Item and spell tooltips: name and description line by line, keeping the native colours. There is a name-only mode.
• Creatures and NPCs in tooltips.
• NPC dialogue in the conversation window.
• Chat lines: what characters and bosses say out loud.
• Mail: the text of incoming letters.

Every category has its own toggle. You can, for example, leave item names in English and translate quests only.

Installing

1. Download the archive from this page and unpack it.
2. Copy the Matreshka and Matreshka_Options folders into the game's add-on directory: World of Warcraft\_anniversary_\Interface\AddOns\
3. Start the game. On the character select screen open AddOns and make sure Matreshka is enabled.
4. Log in and open the settings with /matreshka.

On login the add-on prints its version number in chat, so you can see at once that it loaded.

Chat commands

• /matreshka: open the add-on settings.
• /mtwelcome: a short help screen.
• /mtid: show or hide object IDs in tooltips, handy for translation bug reports.
• /mtfont: turn the bundled font on or off.
• /mtscan: start collecting untranslated text.
• /mtexport: the export window for edits you made yourself.
• /mtmissing clear: clear the collected text.

Cyrillic without empty boxes

The stock font of the English client has no Cyrillic, so the translation would come out as empty boxes. That is why the add-on ships its own Cyrillic font and switches it on by itself. Nothing needs installing separately, and if the font gets in the way, /mtfont removes it.

Where the translation comes from

The base is Blizzard's own Russian text, recovered from an open game server dump: tens of thousands of original-to-translation pairs. It is compiled into compact tables by scripts and validated before the build. Whatever the official translation does not cover is machine translated and then proofread by hand.

What is new in 2.8.0

• 56 new NPC dialogues: the Cipher of Damnation chain in Shadowmoon Valley, Karazhan, Netherstorm and Blade's Edge Mountains. The dialogue base grew from 848 to 904 entries.
• Two chat lines where the server substitutes the player's race or gender.
• One letter: the notification from Khadgar.