Language Packs - ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Forums

03-11-2008 06:26 AM

Dougy

Senior Member

Multilingual ADOM has been discussed before. Is this what you are talking about? It has been regarded as requiring too much maintainence, etc.

Has anyone played Cantr II? In that game different regions speak different languages. Perhaps, in different regions in JADE, NPCs could speak different (or varying) languages.

Although, all this is probably just too much trouble...

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03-11-2008 01:12 PM

spectre

Senior Member

I agree. Too much maintenace.
Noun gender is the most problematic here. I gave it a though at a time, and while it would work for germanic languages, or any other languages that use articles (not affixation) to denote gende. In others it will look iffy at best. Some strings translate perectly most of the time (and long descriptions work well obviously), but at times it is hard to make right.

I am not saying it is impossible, but it will reqire lots and lots of effort to look acceptable (I am speaking about testing if all possible combinations fit, then should a new keyword be introduced make ure it fits with the others) and I think TB won't be satisfied with anythig below acceptable.

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03-11-2008 02:53 PM

Epythic

Ancient Member

Voted no. English is enough. See it as a chance to learn the language :)

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03-11-2008 03:13 PM

spectre

Senior Member

Wonder if you said the same had TB decided to make ADOM in his mother tongue. Learn die Sprache n00b

Hold on, if he did, I wouldn't even know about the game, so there. (-:

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03-11-2008 03:57 PM

sgeos

Ancient Member

Originally Posted by Dougy

Multilingual ADOM has been discussed before. Is this what you are talking about? It has been regarded as requiring too much maintainence, etc.

The JADE message system may not be robust enough to handle multiple languages and there may be other reasons to avoid language packs but giving up the the grounds that ADOM did not do it is defeatist.
ADOM is a different code base.

At any rate, a bad translation is often better than none, and given basic tools sometimes people can become very creative.

Having to replace inlined strings strikes me as a good reason to deem something too expensive to localize.

-Brendan

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03-11-2008 04:44 PM

spectre

Senior Member

"ADOM is a different code base."
True, but it is doubtful that the messages will be handled differently.

"At any rate, a bad translation is often better than none"
Oh no, just hold it right there.
Given that I dabble in this for a living, that's not only a bad viewpoint to promote (from the work-ethics stand), but also entirely not true. Bad translation kills movies, books and games.
Hafta admit, sometimes it makes them hilarious for the first few minutes, but good games deserve to-notch translations.

And some examples:
[MSG_FIND_ITEM "You find <AN_ITEM:$0>]

It should read more like:
MSG_FIND_ITEM "You find <Article><ITEM:$0>

Also, as more variables for item names are introduced (think: burning mace of devastation) more switches will be necessary, like <heorshe> to cater for the affixes attached to nouns of various gender, and depending on the language additional may be needed.

To make sure that all languages can support this. Furthermore, different variables and different conditions for them need to be tied to the <Article> and <heorshe>. This means the game needs to be designed from scratch to cater for all languages' needs, (and I don't think this is doable at the stage JADE is, definitely it has time best spent elsewhere written all over it, not to mention bugs it may produce) and more importantly, sometimes changes to the code may be needed if the language is more complex than that.

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03-11-2008 09:29 PM

Marek14

Member

Originally Posted by spectre

"ADOM is a different code base."
True, but it is doubtful that the messages will be handled differently.

"At any rate, a bad translation is often better than none"
Oh no, just hold it right there.
Given that I dabble in this for a living, that's not only a bad viewpoint to promote (from the work-ethics stand), but also entirely not true. Bad translation kills movies, books and games.
Hafta admit, sometimes it makes them hilarious for the first few minutes, but good games deserve to-notch translations.

And some examples:
[MSG_FIND_ITEM "You find <AN_ITEM:$0>]

It should read more like:
MSG_FIND_ITEM "You find <Article><ITEM:$0>

Also, as more variables for item names are introduced (think: burning mace of devastation) more switches will be necessary, like <heorshe> to cater for the affixes attached to nouns of various gender, and depending on the language additional may be needed.

To make sure that all languages can support this. Furthermore, different variables and different conditions for them need to be tied to the <Article> and <heorshe>. This means the game needs to be designed from scratch to cater for all languages' needs, (and I don't think this is doable at the stage JADE is, definitely it has time best spent elsewhere written all over it, not to mention bugs it may produce) and more importantly, sometimes changes to the code may be needed if the language is more complex than that.

I also translate for a living, and yes, there are many problems that would simply have to be addressed beforehand.

As an extreme example, imagine I'd want to make a Czech version (my mother tongue).

Each prefix would have to be defined in up to six different versions, as in Czech the form of the adjective changes based on whether the noun it modifies is masculine, feminine or neuter, and both have singular and plural forms.

You'd have to define the name of your characters in seven different cases to ensure you will be always referred to correctly. One of the cases is vocative, used exclusively when someone directly adresses you. I'm "Marek", but when someone adresses me, he has to call me "Marku".

All the item names would have to have cases defined in a similar ways. "knife" would be in nominative when it's an item in the list, accusative in most cases when it's an object (you dropped a knife), and instrumental when it's used (goblin attacks you with the knife). Monsters would also need dative (you give the iron ration to the goblin), and genitive (corpse of goblin - as "goblin corpse" would require to make every monster name into an adjective usable with the "corpse", and not all monsters can be transformed into adjective in this way).

And that's just the issues that come to me from the top of my head.

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03-12-2008 07:05 AM

Epythic

Ancient Member

Originally Posted by sgeos

a bad translation is often better than none

Wrong.

Oh and having different translations would split the community: whats an "Orc", whats an "Ork"? (easy example, latter one is german. insert anything difficult. At least I think thats how its written). Being one big community is better, right?

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03-12-2008 09:58 AM

spectre

Senior Member

"As an extreme example, imagine I'd want to make a Czech version (my mother tongue)."

Yeah man, I come from the contry a bit more to the north form yours.
Slavic languages grammar sucks. If I wasn't born with it, I'd never learn it for the life of me (-:

"Each prefix would have to be defined in up to six different versions, as in Czech the form of the adjective changes based on whether the noun it modifies is masculine, feminine or neuter, and both have singular and plural forms."

That's basically the thing. There are ways of going around this, twisting the syntax a bit, but it results in artificial-sounding sentences. I recall when they translated Heroes of Might and Magic series they did something like this:

10 Pikemen want to join you => Pikinierzy: 10 chca sie przylaczyc.

Works, but with the complex sentences in ADOM it would read awfully, basically like a machine script of sorts.

"Oh and having different translations would split the community: whats an "Orc", whats an "Ork"? (easy example, latter one is german. insert anything difficult. At least I think thats how its written). Being one big community is better, right?"

I remember we've had a really neat translation of Warhammer 40K Dawn of War Game in my country, however, once you tried to talk abou it in english, you found out that you basically need to learn all the units' names from scratch.

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03-12-2008 11:15 AM

Marek14

Member

"At any rate, a bad translation is often better than none"

This is just wrong. No translation does nothing for the game. Bad translation actively discourages people from playing it.

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03-14-2008 11:24 PM

Dougy

Senior Member

It's a huge maintainence task and requires many hours of selfless, mundane work by volunteers. Every time a feature is added, he will have to ask each language group for the translation - making future progress slower.

Furthermore, the code would need to be expanded by TB - thus requiring him to have some understanding of the grammar of that language.

This has been experimented with in Cantr II. Here, I feel it was a success, in some ways, because different regions spoke different languages. They have a huge Polish community and therefore have many willing volunteers to translate. In other languages it was quite poor, basically English with a bit of some foreign language mixed in. Sometimes their main translator just dissapeared and never wrote again.

PS. I managed to learned enough German to play "The Settlers of Catan" online.

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03-15-2008 06:55 AM

adom-admin adom-admin is offline

The Creator

There will be no language packs. Period.

I'm right now even while "only" supporting english fighting with some places (especially combat) where it is not really simple to provide meaningful messages due to the highly variable nature of the game and as some comments indicate it would be very hard if not impossible to support anything but a subset of languages. So I really do not intend to spend time on that, sorry. You will need to learn English to be able to play JADE in a meaningful language.

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03-15-2008 08:50 AM

Marek14

Member

I feel that English has unique advantages for free sentence creation thanks to its almost nonexistent grammar.

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03-23-2008 08:29 AM

Dougy

Senior Member

The readme.1st file contains the following:

Code:

III.J. How about translations of the game texts into other languages?
=====================================================================

  Simple answer: no chance... for several reasons:

  -*- ADOM is not prepared to handle multiple languages and I can't see
      any even moderately sane way of adjusting the sources to handle
      this.  I don't want to keep multiple source trees updated.

  -*- Other languages probably have a sufficiently different grammar
      to require changes in the source code depending on the language
      being used.  This is so because ADOM constructs many messages
      "on the fly", e.g. it has no idea how some sentences will end when
      they are started (especially during combat).  I imagine that different
      languages will require major changes to the sentence structure.

  -*- As far as I know the Curses libraries I use at least on some systems
      still expect 7-bit ASCII characters -- thus there is no way of using
      all those fancy special characters in various languages.

  -*- I'm a bit doubtful of the will of some folks to translate those tons
      of text in ADOM -- especially all the additions that will be made with
      each version.  It's a lot of work and what would I do if the translator
      for Canton chinese suddenly drops out for whatever reason?  Such folks
      don't grow on trees, you know.

  -*- The sources won't be made publicly available.

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