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[Dame de la Licorne]

That would be because French is descended from Latin (which is worse that way), and may be the oldest (?) of the romance languages.  Take a look at Latin grammar sometime.  It ain't fun (Latin was my foreign language in high school, I suffered through 5 years of it).

[sweitx]

//And someone would change goblins to Nazis, and then Germany's censorship brigade would freak out and only allow its citizens to download the game if modding was totally impossible.

I think Australia has some VG censorship that could also lead to issues, considering how violent DF can be.  All of this is dependent on someone with too much power actually giving a damn, which is pretty unlikely.//

Imagine changing the dwarf to Nazis and the goblins to Jews.  The Germany's censorship brigade would freak out so much that in a galaxy far far away, a Jedi will sense a "great disturbance in the force".

[Deon]

Come on, is it necessary to troll the thread with "nazis and jews" and country laws? Everyone has his laws and flaws, move over it already.

[Jiri Petru]

I'm a computer games translator and would be happy to jump in and translate the game to Czech when it is possible. Although, to be honest, I have the feeling that Dwarf Fortress is such a complicated, and user-unfriendly game that everyone who'd be willing to play it already knows English well enough. That's the thing with us foreign gamers, you see... we have to learn English if we want to play most of the games.

Making the game suitable for other languages would be a hard work, though. English has no inflection, but many other languages do. Let's take the word "dwarf", for example. In English, you always use the same word no matter what: "This is a dwarf", "You see a dwarf", "The goblin was struck down by the dwarf" "the dwarf is speaking with the dwarf". It's still the same. In Czech (and dozens of other languages), each of these occurrences would use different form of the word. If you've learned Latin, you know what I'm talking about.

It's easy enough to translate if you work with plain text strings like this:
"The goblin was struck down by the dwarf"
It's impossible to translate when you have strings like this:
"The [CREATURE NAME] was struck down by the [CREATURE NAME]"

Toady would have to teach the game how to use inflection.
...but considering his passion for languages, random word generation, poems, and stuff, it probably isn't unreal.

[Deon]

Yeah, I think most combat messages and announcements should be toally rewritten to allow inflection or to avoid situation where it's necesarry, so it's a long task to perfect everything . In most games we see some static text which is translated beforehand and not a lot of something which is generated on-the-fly.
Dwarf Fortress, being interface-heavy, highly depends on dynamically generated text reports which change based on a situation which makes the task to be quite hard.

Toady would have to teach the game how to use inflection.

I think it would be possible to solve it in a more clumsy manner, to build phrases which avoid inflection, but it wouldn't be too nice.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

This makes me curious - do big name games often fail to deal with inflection properly in their translations?

[Jiri Petru]

Atually, I rarely have trouble with that, because most of the games just use fixed texts. It's very rare for the game to actually generate text using tags, etc. The only example that comes to mind are multiplayer games and their strings like:

"USERNAME has burned USERNAME alive."

So yeah, these are a bit problematic, but other than that, I don't recall a single problem.

Oh wait! English doesn't differentiate between genders, but Czech does, so whenever the game speaks directly to the player, I have to translate it in a gender nonspecific way. Not a problem in present or future tenses (Czech doesn't differentiate there either), but a big problem in the past tense. Thing like: "Congratulations! You have done it!" Are pain in the ass, because we have different done for men and women. Mostly it isn't that difficult to solve, only annoying.

But this shouldn't be the case with DF that rarely speaks directly to the player. Except in combat reports... oh yeah, the dreaded combat reports.

[Jiri Petru]

Incidental double post.

[Rowanas]

I'm so glad I got English as my base english.