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Old 01-21-2007, 02:51 PM   #1
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Old 01-21-2007, 07:37 PM   #2
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There's a thread on accessibility here:



As to your second point, I agree to the extent that more could be done to make the major codebases localization friendly. I don't know if contemporary codebases are designed with a language specific library that would make it easier to translate the game to a language other than English, but if I wanted non-English speakers to adopt my codebase that's what I would do. I'm not so sure about the benefits of multilingual muds. It would be cool, but it makes more sense to me to promote translation-friendly codebases to the growing Internet population of places like India and China.
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Old 01-21-2007, 09:07 PM   #3
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Old 01-21-2007, 10:38 PM   #4
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We have several sight-challenged players at Karinth, and each has provided crucial input which is helping us tune the UI for this purpose. Try playing your game with a blindfold or no monitor and see how it responds. It's amazing what pitfalls this will reveal and how clever you have to get to overcome them. One of our biggest pitfalls is a massive wilderness. The work-around, to suppress the constant overhead, is brief mode - and some people find that this works well.

We have witnessed dramatic improvement in literacy and grasp of English by many ESL players over the years. I encourage every game's admin staff to take whatever steps they need to take to make sure that each bit of text is grammatically correct, spell-checked and understandable. After all, we're all about reading!
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Old 01-22-2007, 04:14 AM   #5
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Support for multiple languages requires a large amount of effort even for most graphical applications. For a text-based mud, the amount of effort would be overwhelming - you're likely talking about thousands of messages, tens of thousands of lines for help files and room descriptions, lots of output reformatting (for score, tables, etc), careful command name selection for each language (eg north/south/east/west should ideally have one-letter shortcuts), and so on. Then there's the whole issue of player-customised text (character descriptions, titles, etc).

Add to that the fact that (1) most people online speak English, and (2) even many non-native English speakers prefer playing computer games in English (although admittedly that's usually because the translations aren't very good, or the voices don't sound as good as the English version).

I suppose it would also be worth mentioning that translation work is generally far less interesting than mud development. If you think people get bored writing help files, just wait until you get them to translate several thousand lines of help files.

For a very small codebase I could see multiple languages as a nifty feature. For a large codebase, perhaps something like "multiple language support" would be viable (still requiring each mud owner to add the alternative language files, but certainly being far easier for them than having to manually go through the code looking for each piece of output). But for an individual mud (particularly one which is constantly growing) I don't think it's really feasible - sure, being able to view all 10,000 room descriptions in English, German, French, Spanish and Esperanto is a cool concept with some novelty value, but most players would far prefer to have 50,000 room descriptions in English.
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Old 01-22-2007, 12:35 PM   #6
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I'm not sure if that's true or not really.

Few users in South Korea and China, for instance (probably the two most important countries for online gaming along with the US) speak functional English. Most speak either little or, especially in the case of the Chinese, none.

I wanted to comment on something Erdos said. He wrote that he was considering translating his MUD into Esperanto.

If you're looking for mainstream appeal, Esperanto is about as far away from that as you can get. May as well translate it into Aztec or Klingon.

--matt
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Old 01-22-2007, 03:24 PM   #7
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A fair point. I was thinking more of European countries - in particular, most German gamers I know prefer to play computer games in English, sometimes even going as far as to order them from the UK.

However in regard to the first point, most statistics I've seen suggest that English is the most widely used language on the internet, with chinese at below half that number and korean considerably less still.
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Old 01-22-2007, 05:06 PM   #8
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I think that's probably true, but at the same time, I see a number of games that run German language servers. Puzzle Pirates, for instance, runs a German language ocean (server), and I believe there's a German language Meridian 59 as well. I don't know much about non-English servers though.

That's likely true, but China and South Korea (in particular) are absolutely mad for graphical MUDs in a way Westerners aren't. (Well, South Korea is mad for all types of video games really.) It's worth considering that WoW has more Chinese players than American, for instance.

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Old 01-22-2007, 06:31 PM   #9
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Old 01-22-2007, 09:36 PM   #10
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Old 01-23-2007, 04:49 AM   #11
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I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to here - surely not speakers worldwide?



"Current estimates suggest that 1.5 billion people speak English"

(Obviously there are far fewer native English speakers - an estimated 560 million or so - but I don't think that's a particularly useful statistic in this case).

I can't find any links to the estimated number of chinese speakers, although Wikipedia suggests that it is "more than 1.3 billion".


However I think it's more worthwhile to look at how many speakers of each language there are who use the internet. This link covers language zones rather than actual languages, but may still be of interest:



It shows around 287.5 million English speakers and 102.6 million Chinese speakers - however the statistics are from 2003, and looking further I found this:



Which shows projected figures for 2005 as 300 million English speakers and 220 million Chinese speakers. If the numbers continue to grow at the same rate, then that would place the two at around the same figure in 2007, but I can't find any statistics to back that up.

However once again it's discussing language zones rather than actual languages (i.e., the locations where the ~560 million native English speakers live, rather than the locations where the estimated 1.5 billion overall English speakers live).

I also found this for 2007, although it only gives you the choice of really vague or really specific locations:

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Old 01-23-2007, 01:25 PM   #12
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Speaking for myself. I play at a mud that is hosted in Sweden or some place, it has seperate channels for talking in non-English, but the entire mud is English anyway. In fact, it has like 3 channels for alternate languages.

As for Chinese... Sadly, Chinese people are more likely to speak English than anyone in the English speaking world is likely to speak Chinese. The reason is real simple, technology *tends* to be spoken about and dealt with in English, and that's not likely to change unless we really frack up and let some other part of the world become the "main" source of new technologies. And not even then, despite how hard everyone from companies outsourcing 90% of it to China and some presidents I could name who seem to want to turn the country Luddite, then wonder why we lost everything...

But, seriously, MUDs are at least partly "technology" oriented by nature, which means the people using them are bound to know English. And, unlike China, its unlikely that any mostly English speaking country is going to wake up tomorrow morning and go, "We need to ban muds, because they sometimes say less than politically acceptable things about our government on there." That can, does, has and for the forseeable future, will, happen in China.

While the idea of making multi-lingual muds is interesting, the simply fact is that English is almost universal due to its ties to technological progress, and thus its damn hard to find anyone in a country whose citizens *have* a computer that doesn't know it. What you do get is places where its not universal, and where there is maybe 1 computer for every 10,000 people, because only the ones that have money have computers, and they also know English. Mind you, this may not be the case 100% of the time, but it is the general trend. On average, if you find someone that owns a computer and has the time to play a mud, they probably know enough English to play the mud and enough desire to learn more while playing.

If the biggest concern is Chinese vs. English, as it would seem to be from the posts here, you may be talking about the one group least likely to need one, and maybe the ones least likely to benefit (or be allowed to by their government) from having one in the first place.
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Old 01-23-2007, 02:28 PM   #13
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Shadowfyr wrote:
No, techonlogy tends to be spoken about and dealt with in English in Western countries. Few people in China, South Korea, or Japan talk about technology in English except when specifically speaking to a Western audience, and then only if they speak English (most do not).


Most people who play MUDs (text or graphical) don't speak English. Most people who play text MUDs might, but that's largely because most text MUDs have zero appeal to people who don't speak English. The gaming scene in China, South Korea, and Japan skipped right over text MUDs and went onto graphical ones instead.

It has? China has not banned MUDs. In fact, China's government has taken a far more active interest in encouraging MUD development than Western countries have. There's even a government office devoted to MUDs in China.

Again, this is probably the case where you live, but the whole world isn't a copy of your back yard.

English doesn't even approach being "universal." Most of the world doesn't speak it, you realize. Further, if we limit ourselves to internet users, it is also not universal, though it may enjoy a slim majority, currently (as long as we're including ESL, since the number of native speakers of English on the net is already, I believe, less than the number of native speakers of Chinese using the internet), that will not last long at all.

You might also consider that the biggest MUD in the world has more native Asian users than American and European put together, and that nearly all of those Asian users choose to play in their native languages, not English.

There's a reason that companies localize their MUDs to different markets, and it's not because "English is nearly univerrsal."

--matt
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Old 01-24-2007, 10:40 PM   #14
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This is pretty apropos:



Within 2-3 years China will surpass the US as the #1 country in terms of # of internet users.

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Old 01-25-2007, 02:06 AM   #15
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Old 01-25-2007, 04:19 AM   #16
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Old 01-25-2007, 12:02 PM   #17
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the_logos wrote:
I think you're way off there.

At the University I attended, we had a significant foreign student population. As they discussed an engineering assignment in their native language, and I unintentionally eavesdropped, I could usually get the jist of the conversation from the sprinkling of english terminology.

These days, I'm involved with a couple of international organizations (standards bodies), where again there is a significant population of non-native english speakers. They use english terminology as well. And really, what's the alternative when the terminology is defined in english to begin with. English is, for the moment, the language of business and technology.

Several years ago, I recall reading about a French government initiative to define french language equivalents for many english technology terms. The concern was the anglofication of the french tech industry. I'm pretty sure it's failed.

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Old 01-25-2007, 01:30 PM   #18
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Kavir wrote:
Well sure. Any prediction about the future is speculation by definition. There's a difference between wild guesses and informed speculation though.

Fair enough. Most game developers would cut off their left foot to get into the Chinese market though. Why? It's massive, and they don't play English-language games.

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Old 01-25-2007, 01:41 PM   #19
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Gromble wrote:
Well first, it's hardly surprising that people who chose to go to university in an English-language-speaking country would speak English, is it?

Second, you're kind of missing the point. You're telling me they're speaking about technology in their native language, using English terms here and there. That's like saying Latin is the language of science since so many scientific words come from Latin, and that thus all science books should be published in Latin.

Terms != the English language. Languages freely borrow from each other, and just because we call appetizers served before sitting down to dinner "hors d'oeuvres" doesn't mean that we're speaking French when we talk about dinner. Presenting a book about food to me in French would be about as useful as presenting a game to your average Chinese MUD player in English.

This argument is a bit pointless really. Simply look around. There's a huge Asian market, and none of the major MUDs over there run in English. And if English was truly universal, don't you think that Sohu.com and Baidu.com would be in English by default? (they are both in the top 10 websites in the world in terms of traffic. Sohu, I believe, is in the top 5.)

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Old 01-25-2007, 03:48 PM   #20
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No, I'm not missing the point at all. You said people in asia don't use english when speaking about technology. That's not correct because technology is dominated by english terminology that often does not have native language counterparts.

Perhaps you meant when people attempt to describe a technology in lay terms, then that's something different again.
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