Problems with "female" in non english languages

Started by Hiztaar, April 19, 2014, 02:15:11 PM

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Hiztaar

I open this thread because of a french specificity.

First point :
The game uses the same translation for a human female and for a animal female. but in french we cannot use the same term as female = "Femme" for a human and "Femelle" for an animal.

As we have <Female>Femme</Female>, can we have a <FemaleAnimal>Femelle</FemaleAnimal> for the animals ?


Second point :
When the subject of a sentence is a female, we add a "e" in some occasions, for exemple :
- Male : John est allé à ...
- Femme : Jennifer est allée à ...

Can we have something like a CFEM key that could add a "e" is the subject of an action is female ?
"What do you mean, "*They* cut the power ?"

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Evul

Same issue in Swedish.
Female Human Kvinna
Female Animal Hona

AlyxMS

Same issue in Chinese.
Female Human 女性
Female Animal 雌性

Hiztaar

A changed the name of the thread to show the multilingual problem :)
"What do you mean, "*They* cut the power ?"

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TheEisbaer

Ha! Finally something that is not problematic to translate in german :D
In german its 'm�nnlich' (male) for Human and Animal, same for 'weiblich' (female) :)

AcDie

Agree with above.
Quote from: Hiztaar on April 19, 2014, 02:37:02 PM
A changed the name of the thread to show the multilingual problem :)
Russian more problematic. In english for plural you just add "s" to end (mostly), e.g squirrel & squirrels.
But in russian you can't do same trick :( e.g белка & белки different words. I'm talking about event thing..
Ty plz think little about plural forms? :P

Tynan

I was afraid of this. This is where translation gets hard.

Over time I'll try to include some of this functionality but I must admit it's much lower priority than just getting translation working in the first place. So I will address this stuff but please don't count on it soon.

Best thing you guys can do is come up with a short list of the most important things you'd want changed. For example, I might start by adding a <FemaleForAnimals> translation and using that on animals. And I could add a <labelPlural> to defs (adding 's' breaks even in English for some special words like cactus (cacti/cactuses) ).
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AcDie

Quote from: Tynan on April 19, 2014, 04:13:10 PM
I was afraid of this. This is where translation gets hard.

Over time I'll try to include some of this functionality but I must admit it's much lower priority than just getting translation working in the first place. So I will address this stuff but please don't count on it soon.

Best thing you guys can do is come up with a short list of the most important things you'd want changed. For example, I might start by adding a <FemaleForAnimals> translation and using that on animals. And I could add a <labelPlural> to defs (adding 's' breaks even in English for some special words like cactus (cacti/cactuses) ).
^ THIS take some time (maybe aN or b1 plans) :)
What can be _true_ for one language, may not for other... But plurals always pain inda ass at multilang...
We need to dig deeper guys ;D

joeyeti

#8
Yes, expanding on specific names would be the way in the end I guess.

What I am trying to use so far is something like this:

Instead of "Shooting at {0}." being translated literally into Slovak, I would use something like "Shooting at: {0}". In this way I do not need to use grammatic declination (which is not used in english in the way it is in many other languages) and instead leave the target definition/name in basic form.

AlyxMS

Since "Asymmetric translations in various cases" on matis links to here I'll just post the asymmetric problem here.

The "female" problem.
In Chinese the male is different for animal and human too.

Also the "Growing" problem.
The option tab for growing zone (and hydro-something-something) is called growing.
When you click on the growing plant it is "growing".
It's fine in english since "growing" means both "growing up" and "planting"
It just doesn't work in Chinese.

Geeves

When translating you need not translate every word individually, but instead translate the intended meaning.

So for growing(plant/crops) you need not translate it to a word that describes growing but the meaning.
I did this with the Dutch translation, and wrote down "aan het groeien".
You know it is bedtime when you open a file called GeneralEffecters.xml and the first 2 words you notice are: Butcher and Children.
==============
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AlyxMS

Quote from: Geeves on June 07, 2014, 03:55:55 AM
When translating you need not translate every word individually, but instead translate the intended meaning.

So for growing(plant/crops) you need not translate it to a word that describes growing but the meaning.
I did this with the Dutch translation, and wrote down "aan het groeien".

Problem being there is no such word thanks for Chinese being the most effed up/complicated language in the whole universe.

Lunatico9


Bog

#13
Quote from: Tynan on April 19, 2014, 04:13:10 PM
I was afraid of this. This is where translation gets hard.

Over time I'll try to include some of this functionality but I must admit it's much lower priority than just getting translation working in the first place. So I will address this stuff but please don't count on it soon.

Best thing you guys can do is come up with a short list of the most important things you'd want changed. For example, I might start by adding a <FemaleForAnimals> translation and using that on animals. And I could add a <labelPlural> to defs (adding 's' breaks even in English for some special words like cactus (cacti/cactuses) ).
There's also more than just singular and plural.

A lot of languages have singular, dual, and plural, so the word changes if you're talking about 1 of said item, 2 of said items or 3+ of said items.

English actually used to be that way, but it's mostly died out. We now only have a few examples of it, and so far as I know not for specific objects, such as using "both" instead of "all", "either" instead of "any" or "neither" instead of "none".

In both modern Arabic and ancient Greek they use singular, dual and plural, on top of also having distinction of masculine, feminine and for the latter, neuter as well.  ::)

So to make the system work for all languages you might have to have:

<SingularMasculineHuman>
<SingularFeminineHuman>
<SingularNeuterHuman> (?)
<SingularMasculineAnimal>
<SingularFeminineAnimal>
<SingularNeuterAnimal>
<DualMasculineHuman>
<DualFeminineHuman>
<DualNeuterHuman> (?)
<DualMasculineAnimal>
<DualFeminineAnimal>
<DualNeuterAnimal>
<PluralMasculineHuman>
<PluralFeminineHuman>
<PluralNeuterHuman> (?)
<PluralMasculineAnimal>
<PluralFeminineAnimal>
<PluralNeuterAnimal>

(Traditionally, I doubt most languages have "neuter human", but it's possible. Of course now adays it might be necessary... neuter names for animals on the other hand are often used, sometimes for animals which have been, well, neutered, or creatures such as insects and turtles which aren't obviously male or female)

... and that's not getting into, say, cases which will need to be taken into account in the names of object in some languages and can in some cases can completely change the word, or change it in the middle of a word instead of adding something to the end, which would mean that you might have to multiply the size of the above list by a factor of 5 or more.

Here's an example chart from Koine Greek:

The example unfortunately doesn't have the dual chart. So imagine it being half again bigger.  :P

The good news is that Koine Greek isn't spoken by anybody but scholars today (as far as I know) so I doubt anybody will want it... but Arabic is very much alive and kicking, and even has something like 11 forms which have something to do with nouns, but I don't really know how they work or if they're applicable. I could never get my head around them.

Isn't grammar fun?  ;D
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Tynan

Indeed. It's for this reason that most games (e.g. big AAA games where the text _has_ to be perfect in all languages) simply cannot use generated or assembled text like this. They just can't do it. It's a terrible limitation. My solution is just to make it correct in English and hope that it's not too horrible in other languages. I'll try to add cases for other languages where it makes sense and can be done in a simple way, but the whole grid of possibilities won't be implemented.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog