Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!xlink.net!news.ppp.de!lutzifer!news.rrz.uni-hamburg.de!news.dkrz.de!news.dfn.de!scsing.switch.ch!swidir.switch.ch!univ-lyon1.fr!ghost.dsi.unimi.it!batcomputer!hookup!news.kei.com!eff!news.umbc.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.intercon.com!panix!zip.eecs.umich.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!newsserver.sfu.ca!sfu.ca!neilg
From: neilg@kits.sfu.ca (Neil K. Guy)
Subject: Re: A language problem
Message-ID: <neilg.764537608@sfu.ca>
Sender: news@sfu.ca (seymour news)
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
References: <Cn4E1H.DIL@ztivax.zfe.siemens.de> <joedal.764508688@dfi.aau.dk>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 19:33:28 GMT
Lines: 45

joedal@dfi.aau.dk (Lars Joedal) writes:

>I'm not so sure TADS is limited to English.  TADS 2.1 has some features
>that let you change the standard replies and special words.  I haven't
>tried to use TADS with a non-English language, though.

 Newer versions of TADS do indeed let you change all of the text in
the game to whatever you like. TADS is, however, geared towards the
English language. You should be able to write games in other languages
that use similar grammatical structures for the imperative. (ie: verb
the noun or verb the noun preposition second noun.) If the program
uses wildly different ordering you may be in trouble. The latest
version of TADS is a bit more flexible with preposition ordering, and
that may help.

 Also, TADS works with ASCII and so won't be able to handle two-byte
alphabets or anything - Japanese and Hebrew and Arabic and Chinese are
right out. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not sure how non-Mac
versions handle diacritical accents. (the Mac version of TADS
understands the Macintosh-specific extended ASCII set.) Can anyone
comment if the, say, DOS version knows what to do with the }{[] and
whatnot symbols that get converted to accented characters in some
languages? Don't you get the normal "I don't know the special
character "]" message?

 French should work more or less, I think. I've been toying for some
time with the idea of converting my game in progress to French, but
unfortunately although I can speak French well enough to survive I
can't write it particularly elegantly. But technically I think it
should work - "ouvrez la porte" or whatever should be comprehensible
to TADS. My German is quite awful, so I'm not sure what difficulties
there may be in writing a German TADS epic. I know German tends to put
verbs at the end of sentences where English would have them at the
beginning... I don't know if that would pose a problem. (although does
it do that with the imperative? I think it doesn't but I should
probably shut up and let a German speaker comment on that)

 - Neil K.

 (I'm having a bit of deja vu here... I think I've rambled on this
topic before. Oh, well.)


-- 
  49N 16' 123W 7'  /  Vancouver, BC, Canada  /  n_k_guy@sfu.ca
