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From: ipaschke@xlan.hil.de (Ingo Paschke)
Subject: Re: IF and other languages
Message-ID: <DrByo8.nn@xlan.hil.de>
Organization: private
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References: <cfa_9605112349@saluton.iaf.nl>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 06:14:32 GMT
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Hi!

wiebering@saluton.iaf.nl (Kees Wiebering) writes:

>I think the best opportunity to make games easier to translate is to use
>the Inform libraries written by Graham Nelson. They might be modified in
>some sort of universal way to provide easy translation to several other
>languages. The big advantage (apart from the fact that it's a very good
>system) of the Inform libraries is that changing the grammar is very
>straightforward and is not in any way changing the structure of the
>gamefile as a whole.
>Parser messages are different, though. Most languages have a structure
>that is more difficult to handle (for a computer that is) than English:
>for example the use of gender for nouns (masculin, feminin and neutral)
>and more forms of verbs. Not to think of non-Indo-european languages.

We need nationalized IF-authoring tools. The lack of non-English adventures
stems from the fact that there's no out-of-the-box development system. It
seems difficult (and probably not worthwhile - because the problem of the
non-native speakers is not playing games in English but writing IF!) to
translate existing games, but it should be possible to modify the
inform-libraries for new games in other languages.

>At last some concluding questions. Are there other people out there
>interested in constructing libraries that make translations possible?

Graham Nelson has already done this: His libraries _are_ quite language
independent. There's an exercise in the "Designer's Manual":
"49: Write an Inform game on Occitan (a dialect of medieval French spoken in
Provence". 
The answer states "The details are left to the reader. One must
provide a new grammar file (generating the same actions from a different
syntax) and a very large LibraryMessages object".

Unfortunately, that's a good start, but not all there is to do. The biggest
problem seems to be the implementation of genders and their respective
articles. 

>Does anyone has some experience in writing IF in other languages than
>English? 

I have. I wrote a game in German once around 1991 with a friend who had
developed an adventure-programming-language. Though it was quite good at the
time (the parser understood most of what typical Inform-games do and it had
automapping), I wouldn't want to touch it today because it was written in
QuickBasic :(.

>Is there anyone who tried translating the Inform libraries? Or, does anyone
>has suggestions for starting such a project?

I got inform two weeks ago and I want to try modifying it to write a game in
German. First, I need some time to get familiar with it, though. 

Perhaps we should stay in touch to discuss some of the problems involved?

Ciao,
Ingo.
-- 
Ingo Paschke
Braunschweig, Germany
[MIME, Nextmail welcome.]
