Re: Non-english IF?!


12 Dec 1995 00:41:59 GMT

lerchj@classic11.rz.uni-duesseldorf.de wrote:

: Are some languages more suited to computer-IF than others?
: It seems to me that it is more complicated to write a German
: parser that ''understands'' language considered relatively
: natural than an English one. And Esperanto is claimed to be
: easy to process with computers (I think that originally means
: 'easy to translate automatically). How about other languages?

We had this discussion here a while ago, I think. It certainly is an
interesting one. Reflects the sort of dominant cultural imperialism of
the English language in the field of computers generally... I was
seriously considering translating my in-progress game into French, but
I probably won't, mainly because my French is so bad I'd be embarrassed
by the weakness of the prose. I'd have to find someone else to translate
it for me.

French can be used reasonably well in text adventures, though, as you
can specify commands in the imperative and it doesn't sound too weird.
German is a bit problematic, as sentence construction is more complex.
If you translated literally the same sentence construction used in
English into German it'd sound very bizarre. But English, being a somewhat
telegraphic language in some regards, more or less holds up even if you
strip it down to something as primitive as "verb the noun." Other
languages you can't seem to do that as easily. I recall Dave Baggett
had some thoughts on this last time it came up, being more of an expert
in linguistic matters.

: Also, many IF-writing systems seem to contain inbuilt messages
: in English that make them quite useless for writing in other
: languages.

TADS lets you override all the basic error messages with whatever you
want. And since TADS supports 8-bit ASCII you can also support non-English
accents, though only on a machine-specific basis unfortunately. Inform
is even more flexible since you can rewrite the parser if you're feeling
ambitious.

- Neil K. Guy

--
    Neil K. Guy  *  neilg@sfu.ca  *  tela@tela.bc.ca
        49N 16' 123W 7'  *  Vancouver, BC, Canada