Matreshka | Russian Language Pack for WoW TBC Anniversary and Classic Era

Matreshka translates World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Anniversary and Classic Era, including Hardcore and Season of Discovery, 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.
• Buffs and debuffs: name, description and time left in the tooltip, and the timers under the icons.
• Creatures and NPCs in tooltips.
• NPC dialogue in the conversation window.
• Chat lines: what characters and bosses say out loud.
• The whole mail window: tabs, buttons, letter text and auction house letters with the sale receipt.
• Books, notes and plaques, including the title in the window header.
• The game interface: micro menu and minimap tooltips, window tabs, the reputation, social and options windows, skills, the spellbook, macros, chat channels, the merchant and auction house windows, the portrait, chat and Esc menus. Every label comes from the official Russian client.

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 add-on directory of your game version: World of Warcraft\_anniversary_\Interface\AddOns\ for TBC Anniversary or World of Warcraft\_classic_era_\Interface\AddOns\ for Classic Era, Hardcore and Season of Discovery.
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.
• /matreshka off and /matreshka on: switch the whole translation off and back on. It takes effect at once, no /reload needed. You can also bind a key to it in the game's Key Bindings menu, under Matreshka.
• /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.
• /mtedit: edit the translation of the object under the cursor, same as Ctrl+Shift+E.
• /mtexport: the export window for edits you made yourself.
• /mtmissing: show how much text has been collected.
• /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 translated by hand.

What is new in 2.12.0

• Buffs and debuffs in Russian: the name, the effect description and the "54 minutes remaining" line in the tooltip, and the timers under the icons. The descriptions come from the client's official Russian templates.
• The whole options window: categories, settings, their tooltips, dropdowns and key bindings.
• The auction house: tabs, item categories, the rarity list, column headers, time left and bid status, posting an item. Tabs added by other add-ons stay as they are.
• The merchant window, skills, the spellbook with spell ranks, macros, chat channels and the Goodbye button in NPC dialogue. Every label comes from the official Russian client.