Translation to other languages?

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Geoff the Medio
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#16 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Aquitaine wrote:...take the practical route and use the flavor of English employed by the majority of the content creators. [...] I don't really care though. :)
Omitted u's in words like flavour or s's where there should be z'd (that's "zeds" btw) irritate me greatly... far more than they should... When I see "flavor", I read "flah-vore"... which doesn't really make sense, but happens nonetheless... So yeah... I strongly support British-type spellings.

Also, one time a prof, teaching wave mechanics, gave a little aside rant about disliking saying "zed" since then that would be the only letter for which there are no real words that contain the letter in a syllable such that it produces the sound of its name. That seemed like a rather odd way to think about it to me... and I guess he forgot about W ... ?

Tyreth
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#17 Post by Tyreth »

Aquitaine wrote: I suspect that the simplest choice here is to take the practical route and use the flavor of English employed by the majority of the content creators. I can write UK-style if necessary, but to the best of my knowledge, most of the design team uses American English. I don't really care though. :)
I tend to use the British spelling, since I'm an Australian. It doesn't really worry me either - and we can include both in the final release anyway. I'm inclined to just flip a coin for an 'official' decision, if no-one has objections :)

Perhaps a quick poll of developers and the style of English they use would be helpful.

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utilae
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#18 Post by utilae »

I use the brittish spelling also, eg colour instead of color.

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#19 Post by Bastian-Bux »

I make so many spelling mistakes that no-one can say what kind of english I do use anyway ^^.

PS: Hungarian is no european language. Isn't it closer related to turk languages (those spoken in Turkmenistan and even further eastwards) then with the indoeuropean languages? :D
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#20 Post by drek »

as far as I know,

Myself, Aq, and Powercrazy are the only americans who are active. I'm pretty sure we are out numbered.

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#21 Post by tzlaine »

drek wrote:as far as I know,

Myself, Aq, and Powercrazy are the only americans who are active. I'm pretty sure we are out numbered.
Ahem.

Blade Runner
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#22 Post by Blade Runner »

Bastian-Bux wrote: PS: Hungarian is no european language. Isn't it closer related to turk languages (those spoken in Turkmenistan and even further eastwards) then with the indoeuropean languages? :D
Good point. :D But IMHO we can call it European, because we live in the middle of Europe more than 1000 years ago and we use the standard latin characters (+ a few spec char like german). :D

PS: FYI There are a lot of different ideas about the Hungarian language origin, from Sumerian to Finno-Ugric, included what you already mention turk languages. We have a many thousand years old own alphabet, but you are lucky, because we dont use it anymore, just the same old boring latin characters. :)
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krum
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#23 Post by krum »

It's firmly established, and relatively easy to see, that Hungarian is Finno-Urgic, like Estonian and Finnish. There is also a significant amount of loaned Slavic vocabulary. I fail to see how being Finno-Urgic makes it "not an European language", though (?) Both the Indo-European and Finno-Urgic families have presence in both Europe and Asia. And it doesn't make a lot of sence to talk about geographical origins of linguistic families, but to the degre that it does, both families probably have their origin in somewhere in Eastern Europe, North of the Black and Caspian seas; in the rest of Europe at the time were spoken languages of a linguistic family whose only modern descendant seems to be Basque.

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#24 Post by noelte »

tzlaine wrote:
drek wrote:as far as I know,

Myself, Aq, and Powercrazy are the only americans who are active. I'm pretty sure we are out numbered.
Ahem.
:lol:

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#25 Post by Blade Runner »

han_krum wrote:It's firmly established, and relatively easy to see, that Hungarian is Finno-Urgic, like Estonian and Finnish. There is also a significant amount of loaned Slavic vocabulary. I fail to see how being Finno-Urgic makes it "not an European language", though (?) Both the Indo-European and Finno-Urgic families have presence in both Europe and Asia. And it doesn't make a lot of sence to talk about geographical origins of linguistic families, but to the degre that it does, both families probably have their origin in somewhere in Eastern Europe, North of the Black and Caspian seas; in the rest of Europe at the time were spoken languages of a linguistic family whose only modern descendant seems to be Basque.
Yeah. I know what is the official opinion about the origin of the Hungarian language. I have Finnish and Estonian friends and their language sounds far strange to me than even modern day turkish. Our vocabulary has a very few words which is probably Finno-Ugric origin, a whole lot of basic words from turkish and the rest came from slav, latin, german, english etc. The sturcture of our language is close to finno-ugric, turkish and sumer, so i dont think it is a closed case. :)

Anyway, hungarian is European language with quite long sentences and structures, so it can used to make the necessary space for the translations. :)
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Romance Languages

#26 Post by Black_Dawn »

The "european languages" shouldn't be to problematic.
You would be suprised. German (and related languages) should in fact be one the easier languages to do, because the sentence structure of German is very similar to English (it's not called anglo-SAXON for nothing). Romance languages on the other hand tend to reverse certain sentence elements. A direct translation of the the words "hot dog" into French become "chien chaud" ("dog hot") for example.

Add to this the fact that objects in romance languages are spoken of in either "masculine" or "feminine" and that word structure changes accordingly. For example, in the phrase "La table est grosse" (the table is large), table is feminine, so le becomes la and we add se to the end of gros. Of the major romance languages, French is the most complicated (what with the antiquated accent and grammer system). I would suggest translating your game into French first, and then from French to the other Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portugese, etc.)
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#27 Post by Daveybaby »

utilae wrote:I use the brittish spelling also, eg colour instead of color.
lol @ the irony of 'brittish' spelling. :wink:
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utilae
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#28 Post by utilae »

Daveybaby wrote:
utilae wrote:I use the brittish spelling also, eg colour instead of color.
lol @ the irony of 'brittish' spelling. :wink:
oops lol, yeah well i did that on purpose, i mean't british, lol.

Aquitaine
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#29 Post by Aquitaine »

I'm as loathe to say we will all use favourite and armour because it annoys Geoff as I am to say we won't because I will be the one going over all the content in the end to proof it. But british spellings don't annoy me, mostly because I'm an Anglophile. :)

By v1.0 we might have a completely different makeup of the team. I guess we could just localize between UK and US spellings as we localize between German and English. So we could, before we release v1.0, clone whatever spellings we end up with do a big 'ol search and replace.
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#30 Post by tzlaine »

So far, the entire english file is in US spelling, afaik. If we want a UK version, that's fine, but we should continue to maintain the US one, since it is already quite extensive.

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