To release or not to release...

[sgeos]

No chance you'd get anywhere. If I remember correctly, Spanish has those weird letters (accents and all that; a little bit like our german umlauts (?????? and of course the ?)) - which means you'd need unicode support

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.

And even if it was possible technically - it would be quite a lot of work. Just think about the mad minstrel songs, and the fortune cookies.

Bah. This is all translation work that has no technical implications if ASCII is used. Although there is are a fair amount of messages to translate, none of it is difficult translation work and the amount of text is finite.

On the other hand: I think the fact that there is "only" an english version is good, because:
- it keeps us together: there are not *that* many ADOM players; and now imagine there were x forums for y languages...

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?

You'd have to localize monster and item names and so on,

Not a big deal. A full time translator can typically pull off ~2000 words per day, so I imagine monsters and items would be translated more or less instantly. The amount of text is finite, as ADOM is not being actively developed, so I imagine we could use a calculator to get a rough estimate of the amount of time it would take to translate it.

and that would mean that we couldn't really communicate with each other.

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?)

I fear the translation would never, ever reach the quality of the original thing.

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.

The writing is far and away not what makes ADOM special.

It is certainly not impossible to translate. Treating it like the Qur'an in this regard is just silly.

The in game mini-FAQ seems to suggest that multiple language support for ADOM would require serious amounts of work on the source code, rather than just translation of in game text

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).

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.