R: [MUD-Dev] Internationalisation: The effect of Tongues invirtualsocietes

[Ghilardi Filippo]

From: Derek Licciardi

> Oracle Corporation made a run at building a multi-lingual database
> to break down the English centricity of the Internet.  It failed
> to meet that goal because real-time conversion was too large of a
> task for the company to handle.  Frankly I don't believe it can be
> solved yet.

I rember when Origin (OSI at the time) added a realtime translator
inside Ultima Online.

I rember almost every italian having troubles using it and everyone
disabled it.

Also, language spoke in a MMO isn't even good english with grammar
error free sentences. There's many words that are built from the
cumminity or with typos as is often important to be fast writers and
leave typos where they are as long as sentence is understandable.

Even translating sentences and names of NPC's and objects isn't a
good idea.  If you have both english and non-english players,
providing different text based on language is a very bad idea. I
click on an item and read a different text from the other player,
how we can talk each other referring about the very same object?
Doing so, the engine would introduce new errors that will add to
those that already can persist in the understanding between two
different people speaking different languages. If the text is the
same at least both can agree on a name.

Often all a player ask is to buy/sell/directions.  Who don't know
english can learn to do those actions pretty quickly. Yes, they'll
miss a lot about stories, events and so on. But at least they can
play.

> To try and do something in a MMO with a fraction of the budget
> doesn't seem too likely.  At best, I think you'll see what you do
> with DAoC, nationalized servers run by separate live teams.

If the market is big enought yes.  For example, in italy all films,
fictions... everything at cinema and TV is in italian. Everything is
traslated and doubled (no subtitles). This is because of culture and
mainly population (60mln). If population would have been 6mln I
doubt I could have everything translated.

ciao ciao
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