Re: [TFUI] Re: Locale independence and grammatical structure

From: "Phlip" <phlip2005.at.gmail.com-hHKSG33Tihg+1LFaA5+Ji38/[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" 
<TestFirstUserInterfaces.at.yahoogroups.com-hHKSG33Tihg+1LFaA5+Ji38/[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, February 27, 2005 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: [TFUI] Re: Locale independence and grammatical structure


>
> Marc Brooks wrote:
>
>> > What you're describing - in English - is generally considered a bad
>> > practice by those with experience in localization. So rather than
>> > adding complexity in order to allow pluralizing, changing case, etc.
>> > in other languages, I suggest you remove complexity by storing
>> > every phrase separately.
>>
>> +1 or I8 ;)
>
> The OP (who is not here) described localizing a game. That may have 
> included
> the equivalent of RPG conversations. So the number of individual strings
> could undergo combinatoric explosion.

That makes it really hard. Good natural language translation
is still a long way off, and good translation for something like
a game is even farther off.

However. If I had to do something like this, I'd investigate
having the output be some kind of linguistic structure that
would then go to a language (and cultural!) dependent
module that would convert it to the target language. That
same layer would handle input as well.

I suspect this would still be in the area of a PhD research
project, but if you had a relatively small specified set of languages
and only the interactions in a game, it might be doable.

>
>> > efficiency is not that big a deal. Program complexity is. And the
>> > time and effort of the localizers is definitely a big deal.
>>
>> +1 really, and localization is just as hard as internationalization.
>> Trust us, we've done it.
>>
>> > Suggestion: Use comments in a text file - or an extra column in
>> > a database - to tell the localizers how each string is used.
>>
>> Exactly right.  My ORM has explicit support for localized strings for
>> lookup tables and such, for precisely this reason.  It's so hard to
>> graft on this stuff and make it SIMPLE, so "get ugly early"[1] and
>> just do it right the first time.
>>
>> [1] http://www.softwareforyourhead.com/
>
> Oh, another thing: The game might be finished, in English.

Game Over.

John Roth
>
> -- 
>  Phlip
>  http://industrialxp.org/community/bin/view/Main/TestFirstUserInterfaces
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