Originally Posted by
sgeos
French speakers prefer to have accents, but they can get by without them. I suspect Spanish speakers are the same. I suspect many of them would prefer no accents to English.
Still, that would look amateurish. I get a headache everytimes someone writes... dunno, "Gruesse" (greetings) instead of "Gr??e". A friend of mine types on an english keyboard, nearly all texts he writes have this problem. It's ugly.
Originally Posted by
sgeos
This is a xenophobic argument. Are you actually afraid of growing numbers of Spanish ADOM players? Are you afraid of them if you don't deal with them now and you would not deal with them on a Spanish ADOM newsgroup?
Huh? No, I'm not afraid of spanish ADOM players. I'm afraid that the already small group of roguelike-players might get separated by the use of different languages.
I don't want a german translation either.
Originally Posted by
sgeos
so I imagine we could use a calculator to get a rough estimate of the amount of time it would take to translate it.
Code:
$ strings Adom_winbeta4.exe | wc
24391 159248 971344
$ man wc | head -n 6 | tail -n 1
wc - print newline, word, and byte counts for each file
In any case, one man made it, so it should be possible for another man to translate it. Still, probably a lot of effort. Do you know a "professional translator" who'd be willing to do a full-time job for free? No? So it's gonna take a *bit* longer. And remember, there are quite a number of languages...
Originally Posted by
sgeos
Not true. I play games in Japanese and I am used to referencing both English and Japanese material. I have no trouble communicating with English or Japanese players and they have no trouble communicating with me. This is not a problem. (How many languages can you communicate in?)
FYI, I only use three languages (german, english, french). Well, actually, forget about french.
When playing german games I often have the problem that I don't know the english names, and vice versa.
Originally Posted by
sgeos
This fear is unfounded. Go out and talk to people. There are people out there who have native bilingual language skills. Have more faith in other people.
Of course there are such people, but face it, they are a minority.
And then, if there are no problems - why make localized versions at all?
Originally Posted by
sgeos
It is certainly not impossible to translate. Treating it like the Qur'an in this regard is just silly.
Ok, I got that point.
Originally Posted by
sgeos
The thing is, localizable text is a problem that has been solved, and the solution is simple. This should be no harder to implement than any other feature. From the arguments given, the opposition to localization seems to either be lack of knowledge of the solution, or lack of desire for localizations. If the real reason is that localizations are not a priority, I wish that would just be stated honestly instead of trying to pretend that an insurmountable technical limitation is preventing localization. Go see how Google Android apps handle strings (they use a single XML file).
I never said that it was impossible due to technical limitations. But still, they are there and have to be worked around.
Besides:
1. you have a problem
2. you decide to use XML
3. now you have two problems.
Originally Posted by
sgeos
To localize ADOM, the piecemeal messages ("The foo", "attacks", "and", "misses") would need to be replaced with static messages ("#THE_MONSTER() attacks and misses.", "#THE_MONSTER() attacks and hits for #X() damage.", ...) that are dispatched when the final piece of piecemeal version would have been printed. These modifications would not be hard for someone who has the time to go in and permute all possible messages (using message tags, like #THE_MONSTER(), to keep the number of permutations reasonable). Also, all inline strings would need to replaced with string IDs.
Thanks, but I know how it's done technically.
You already named one big problem: development time.
Here's another problem that might or might not be related to adom: the use of male/female/plural... word forms, and articles. Not a problem in english, where you simply write "the". But french (le/la/les...) ? I'd probably get it wrong, so I don't give an example.