Designing a Non-Specific Language Application, e.g. planning for localization

Question

Made this community wiki :3

I'm developing a basic RPG, and one of my goals from the beginning is to make sure that my program is language non-specific. Basically, before I design or start programming any menus, I want to make sure that I can load and display them out of supported languages so I am not hard-coding in values.

(It would save me from many migranes down the road)

For this example, let's use Western Left-to-Right languages. English, Spanish, German, French, Italian.

This is a basic example of what I have.
One XML file contains a mapping and design of a conversation.

<conversation>
<dialog>line1</dialog>
<dialog>line2</dialog>
</conversation>

Other XML files contains the definitions.

<mappings language="English">
<line1>This is line 1 in English!</line1>
<line2>Other lines are contained in language-separated xml files</line2>
</mappings>

Heh. This would work great, besides the fact that I forgot that English doesn't assign genders to their words, whereas other languages do. So, where one sentence might be enough in English, I might need to have two sentences in other languages, one to cover the masuline tense and the other to cover the feminine tense.

What would be the most condusive way of solving this problem? Right now, I've considered coming up with different mapping tables, one excuslively for masculine-tense sentences whereas the other table would cover just feminine-tenses. Or just reading from different defintion tables.

And another kicker would be based within my game data design. I never thought about it, but I might need to store within my game items and characters their sexes so I can use the correct sentence. However, other languages might have their own specific quirks that I would need to consider as well (though thankfully, from what I know Italian and Spanish are relatively similar, and French possibly as well.)

So, obviously this is a huge task ahead of me. What other design considerations should I think of? Rightnow, I'm thinking a static class would be easiest. Configure selected language at startup, throw in inputs and hopefully get a string back.

Any ideas (looking to throw ideas around :P)

Answer 1

As for genders you may try encourage translators to use non-gender specific translations (which is usually possible in business applications but might be impossible here).

You may have also encounter the problem somewhere else. Other (non-English) languages have multiple plural forms. For example: "Your team has acquired 2 swords". No matter how many swords you will actually receive, be it 5 or 1000, in English you will always end up with one plural sentence. But this is not the case in many languages.

Answer 2

There's two general ways to approach this: brute force and trying to be clever. Brute force means writing each possible line and including it with your XML files. It's a lot of work, but it will work.

Trying to be clever gets into deep water, fairly fast, particularly if you're trying to cover a whole lot of languages.

You need to keep more information about characters than gender. In Russian, for example, there are different words meaning "you" depending on whether you're being informal or formal (or talking to multiple people), and the verb endings are also different. There are different translations of "please pass the bread" depending on the formality. In other languages, getting the translation right depends on social status.

There are issues, as pawel_dyda pointed out, with singular, plural, and possibly dual case. Other languages also use different word orders: "The arrows are X coppers each, so to buy Y arrows you'll need Z silver" may require you to keep track of the order of the numbers.

Visual C++ and MFC come with internationalization facilities that are actually pretty good. You'd keep the strings in a resource file, and it's possible to substitute numbers and the like in while keeping the order correct for different languages.

Look up "internationalization" (often abbreviated to "i18n") on the web. There's plenty of stuff out there.