Hi,
I have great news for you: the dialog file you are working on is now obsolete
But don't worry, it's really good news.
The ini syntax was too hard to maintain and translate. When translating into another language, the number of lines may change. You needed to separate explicitely the dialogs in groups of 3 lines and to set up their succession manually. This was very, very tedious and error prone. So I have changed the syntax of dialog files in the development version of the git repository. The modification will take effect in the next release (solarus 0.9.1 for the engine and zsdx 1.4 for the game).
The new syntax is specified here:
http://www.solarus-engine.org/doc/dialog_syntax.html. It's in Lua (but you don't have to learn anything). Lua is a scripting language also suited for describing data, including big data files. But you don't care, you don't have to know Lua. You just have to translate the "text" part of each dialog.
A dialog can now have any number of lines and the engine takes care of splitting them in groups of 3 lines for the dialog box. Translating dialogs will be much less painful.
As an example, see the updated French dialogs:
https://github.com/christopho/solarus/blob/master/quests/zsdx/data/languages/fr/text/dialogs.lua. It's now straightforward to translate a dialog.
I initially wanted to make this improvement before the first release of the game, but I was in a hurry to finish the game. Sorry I did not do that sooner. I did not expect people would start translating the game so shortly after the release
Thanks again for your work.
What you did so far is obviously not lost. A conversion script is available in the repository (in tools/data_files_conversion/) to convert existing dialogs to the new format. To use it, type lua dialogs_0.9.0_to_0.9.1 < dialogs.dat > dialogs.lua.