Difference between revisions of "Language and Translation Issues"

Revision as of 21:46, 30 March 2013

This article is a WIP that aims to document issues the game has with language and translation.

Gender and Sex

The game's "gender support" for units merely considers sex rather than grammatical gender; languages that have more than two genders or don't mostly match it with sex are screwed.

We need to somehow implement per-language gender support that would let translators define what gender get associated with each unit type and variant and what genders exist in the language. A language can have different numbers and names for genders, for example, Old English and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter, Spanish has masculine and feminine, and Polish has masculine, feminine, and neuter in addition to masculine gender's subdivisions of animate, inanimate, personal, and non-personal.

And, of course, a different thing can have different genders across languages, and this can be particularly problematic for the undead; for example, in Spanish and Old English, a shadow is feminine but masculine in German.

There also needs to be a way to let content somehow make use of this support, probably in a way similar to gettext plurals.

Finally, conscious beings that have no biological sex anymore but still have gender identity still need female variants. For example, in Spanish, a lich with a female identity would still say "Estoy cansada" ('I'm tired') rather than "Estoy cansado".

Grammatical Number

Gettext plurals support isn't exposed to WML and Lua, thus preventing content creators from using this feature.

Right now, the lack of support for it in Lua is problematic since the turn counter feature in the objectives dialog requests an arbitrary number; right now, it pretty much just caters to English and most other "Standard Average European" languages that just use the plural with everything above 1. In Scottish Gaelic, for example, to say that there are 12 turns left, the form "chuairt" (not a number word) has to be used, if 20 are left, "cuairt" has to be used, if 19 are left, "cuairtean" has to be used, and so on.

Variable Subtitution

Variable subtituion is often (ab)used in translatable strings, and this can be problematic with languages that ... <insert more content>

Egocentric Directions

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Vertical Text

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 We need to somehow implement per-language gender support that would let translators define what gender get associated with each unit type and variant and what genders exist in the language. A language can have different numbers and names for genders, for example, Old English and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter, Spanish has masculine and feminine, and Polish has masculine, feminine, and neuter in addition to masculine gender's subdivisions of animate, inanimate, personal, and non-personal.
-And, of course, a different thing can have different genders across languages, and this can be particularly problematic for the undead; for example, in Spanish and Old English, a shadow is feminine, it is neuter in Latin, and masculine in German.
+And, of course, a different thing can have different genders across languages, and this can be particularly problematic for the undead; for example, in Spanish and Old English, a shadow is feminine but masculine in German.
 There also needs to be a way to let content somehow make use of this support, probably in a way similar to gettext plurals.