Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!Germany.EU.net!mcsun!sunic!news.lth.se!pollux.lu.se!magnus
From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Non-English adventures (was Re: Adventure design)
Message-ID: <1993Feb12.112523.7231@pollux.lu.se>
Sender: news@pollux.lu.se (Owner of news files)
Nntp-Posting-Host: dirac.thep.lu.se
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
References: <930112.095148.ahaavie@pcifm02>
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1993 11:25:23 GMT
Lines: 69

In article <930112.095148.ahaavie@pcifm02> ahaavie@ulrik.uio.no (Anders Haavie) writes:
>
>I want to make an adventure program based on a norwegian tv-series made  in the  
>1970's. Good idea? I like it. The only problem I have is that I want to make the 
>whole in norwegian, and all the "adventure design programs" are made in english.
>
>Is there any way to solve this problem?

Not that I know of. All adventure design systems of which I've heard
are based on English, and Englih grammar is sufficiently different
from Norwegian grammar that you'd not only have to change all the
messages, but do _extensive_ rewriting of the parser. 

If you do feel up to doing that, I owuld recommend you to using
Advsys, since for that program the entire source code is freely
available. 


The problem of IF in non-English languages is certainly interesting.

I've only seen one adventure game written in a language other than
English. This game is called Berg ("Mountain") and is written in
Swedish, directly from scratch in Turbo Pascal. It was pretty small
and simple (I think the authors intended it as a "test balloon" for
later games). 

Personally, I had never seriously considered writing IF in any language
other than English (probably because one gets so used to all games
being in English that anything else would seem unnatural, and of course
also writing in English maximizes the potential audience), but this
game made me do some serious thinking about the issues.

One obvious problem with writing an IF parser in Swedish (or
Norwegian, which is very similar) is the definite articles. The
Nordic languages use suffixes to indicate the definite form as well as
plural, and these suffixes are far from regular. In English, you can
often simply let your parser ignore all definite and indefinite
articles: "Take the box" and "take box" would in most situations be
totally equivalent. Furhtermore, the word "box" would always be used
in referring to it; "There is a box here", "you drop the box", etc.

In Swedish, a room description could end with 'Det finns en l{\aa}da
h\"ar' - "There's a box here" (I'm using TeX notation for the special
Swedish characters), but if you wanted to take the box, you would have
to say "ta l{\aa}dan" - "take the box". "Ta l{\aa}da" would sound very
strange. This will make the parser as well as the representations for
objects more complex.

A less obvious problem is that Swedish is far
less tolerant of ellipses than English. For example, the telegraphic
style used in a typical IF command: "Take red dagger. Put it in
purse." is at least almost correct English, but anyone expressing
himself similarly in Swedish would sound like a half-wit. This not only
makes the required parser more complicated, but also makes it far more
cumbersome to play the game. I remember reacting to that in Berg - I
had to type a lot more than I was used to from English-language
adventures. 


A final note: The authors of Berg are Fredrik Kilander (fk@dsv.su.se)
and Mats Wiklund (whose mail address I've forgotten). And "su" means
"Stockholm University", it has nothing to do with the top-level
ex-USSR domain :-)).

              Magnus Olsson                | \e+      /_
    Department of Theoretical Physics      |  \  Z   / q
        University of Lund, Sweden         |   >----<           
 magnus@thep.lu.se,  thepmo@selund.bitnet  |  /      \===== g
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