Gammon Forum

MUDs for non-English speakers?

I am working on designing a new MUD server, which is tentatively intended to be useable by players from different countries (ie. those that do not necessarily speak English), and am curious to know the state of non-English mudding.

If you speak a language other than English (and presumably English as well if you are reading this) then I would appreciate if you could reply to this post and answer the questions below to the best of your knowledge. Thanks! :)

Earlier posts on this subject

The basic idea is covered in a forum post: Multi-lingual MUD? which was based on an earlier forum thread: MUDs in languages other than English? . Read those two posts for more details about the general idea.

Examples of non-English MUDs already wanted

There have been various posts about people wanting MUDs in different languages. For example: SMAUG in Russian , also: SMAUG in Spanish, and: Running PennMUSH under win32 with support for Scandinavian characters . Because of these posts I think there is some sort of demand for MUDs in different languages.

Questions

1. How do players from your country play MUDs? Do they:

   • Learn English and play an English MUD?
   • Use an existing MUD server (eg. SMAUG, ROM, Merc, Dawn Of Time) and write their own areas/skills/commands in their own language?
   • Use an existing MUD server and translate internal messages as well as writing the area files from scratch? Internal messages would be ones like:

     
     "Something catches your attention.";
     "Something interesting catches your eye.";
     "Something colorful flows by.";
     "Something that looks cool calls out to you."
     "Your group wouldn't like that."
     "You hand out zero coins, but no one notices."
     "You don't have that much gold."
     "Just keep it all."
     

     There are over 18,000 such messages in SMAUG alone, so such a task is not trivial.

   • Use a server written from scratch for that country? If so, can you give the name/site/URL of such a server?
   • Use some other method, such as automatic translation, or something else?

2. How important do you think it is for MUDs to support multiple languages? In other words, if a new MUD server was developed, what would you think is a good idea ...

   • Just write it in English.
   • Put all messages in a separate file so that the file has to be translated, however the C (or C++) code would not need to be touched. However, a given MUD using this server would only support one language (eg. French).
   • Support multiple languages in a single game. In this scenario, players would be asked their language as the first question, and then all subsequent messages would appear in that language (eg. "What is your name?", room descriptions, error messages) and it would accept commands (eg. "north", "look", "inventory") in the appropriate language.

   This last option is the most ambitious, and most complicated to do, but do you think it is a waste of time? For instance, would you have problems like needing admins on, who spoke each (supported) language, so they could deal with trouble players? For instance, an admin who spoke only French might have trouble dealing with a player who spoke only Italian.

3. Are there other issues that a multi-language MUD would need to address? Examples that spring to mind are the way numbers are formatted (eg. is "one thousand" represented as "1,000" or "1.000"?), dates (if applicable, eg. date you last logged on), word-order for automatically generated lists.

   One example that springs to mind is the automaticalled-generated output from MUDs frequently is customised to the gender (alleged gender, anyway) of the player. For example, if you give Gandalf a coin the MUD might say "You give him a coin" or "You give her a coin". Things like singular/plural (sword/swords, fish/fishes), masculine/feminine (him/her, he/she), and sentence construction ("you give John a sword" or "a sword to John you give"). If the output from the MUD was going to look smooth it would need to be able to adapt to those changes.

4. Any general comments?

Thanks for participating.

1. How do the French play MUDs? I have no idea. The French people who play on my MUD just learn English. I think that's how most French people do it. I've never heard of a server in French and I'm not sure anyone is working on one. (Then again, I haven't looked a lot.) But yes, most people from school and whatnot just brushed up their English. There were a few people who did not play because they did not speak English, though.
   
   
2. If you were going to do this, I'd go for option 3. You could have multiple resource files loaded, one for each language you support, and the character (or connection, or wherever you store it) would say which one to draw text from.
   
   However, this does create the admin problem, as you mentioned. You also have the problem of people speaking using 'say' and not understanding the other's language. As one person put it that could create some extra "spice" for the game, as it were, but frankly I think it'd be more of a problem than much of anything else.
   
   Of course, this would also mean that every single darn little piece of text generated by the MUD would have to be in multiple languages, including all room descriptions... ugh. :)
   
   One way to address the different commands would be to make different command tables for the different languages. For example if your language is English than "north" is mapped to 'do_north' in the code; if your language is French it's "nord" but still mapped to 'do_north', etc. This would mean the command interpreter would have to be aware of this sort of stuff, and look up commands accordingly.
   
   As far as admins are concerned, I'd say you'd just have to say "This MUD's main language is X, deal with it". It's already a huge help to most people to have the game output in their language; in fact, that would be really cool. Still, you have the basic problem of human-to-human interaction, and for that you just have to say "this is the language, tough."
   
   
3. Yes, you would need to have a different sentence construction based on the language.
   
   For instance: You give Gandalf a sword.
   becomes in French: Vous donnez une epee a Gandalf. (accents left out intentionally)
   
   So the subject and verb are in the same spot, but the direct object and indirect object changed places.
   
   The easiest way to solve this particular one would probably be to have named arguments to your phrases. You would then feed the resource string the arguments... sort of like the XML elements used in MXP. The code would just have to fill out the named arguments and their value, and the resource string parser (which would be something you'd need to add) would put them in the right place depending on what the sentence requests.
   
   E.g. You give %name% %object%.
   Vous donnez %object% a %name%.
   
   This does however bring up the interesting problem of articles. English generally uses "a" or "an" depending on whether the first letter is a vowel or not. French however (as do most European languages) has gender to its articles. You'd say "une epee" but "un baton". So that's something you'd have to deal with as well.
   
   You also have, of course, the problem of numbers being 1,000 in some countries, 1.000 in others... and that in the US, dates are mm/dd/yy, in all (I think) of Europe it's dd/mm/yy... etc.
   
   
4. I think that if a MUD is going to be multi-lingual, it is absolutely essential to design it as such from the very beginning. It's a great deal of work. I'm not sure if it's worth it, but who knows, maybe it might open the MUDding community to the rest of the world. I mean, let's face it, almost all MUDders are either English-speakers or learned it one way or another. I've seen very, very few people play who didn't speak English at least a little bit.
   
   I have to say that my eyes perked when I saw you're designing a new server. Is there a way I could have a hand in that? I've (sort of) started work on one my own, but I don't have the manpower to do it by myself. If you'd be willing to let me work with you that'd be really neat. Just a thought, though. :)