Writing non-English interactive fiction

[Karel Krabbel]

Hello all,

I'm completely new to Interactive Fiction and find it very
interesting. I've read about Inform 7 and would like to give it a try.
However, I would like to write my game in Dutch instead of in English.
My question to you is: is it possible?

Kind regards,
Karel

[Victor Gijsbers]

Karel Krabbel wrote:

> I'm completely new to Interactive Fiction and find it very
> interesting. I've read about Inform 7 and would like to give it a try.
> However, I would like to write my game in Dutch instead of in English.
> My question to you is: is it possible?

I believe there is no Dutch Inform 7 library at the moment, which makes
it pretty much impossible to use Inform 7 to create a Dutch game.

There is, however, a fully functional Dutch library for Inform 6--I used
it to create "De baron" a couple of years ago. Inform 6 is a very
different language from Inform 7, and probably not as friendly to
non-programmers; but it works well, and is probably the best option for
writing Dutch IF at the moment.

(I know Yuri Robbers was planning to translate I7 to Dutch, but I
haven't heard anything about that project for years.)

It would be interesting to me to hear from I7-translators how much work
it is to create a translation.

Kind regards (& vriendelijke groeten),
Victor

[Otto Grimwald]

On 23/12/2009 23:33, Karel Krabbel wrote:

> However, I would like to write my game in Dutch instead of in English.
> My question to you is: is it possible?

Hello,

yes it's possible to do so. The problem is there is currently no support
for Dutch with Inform 7. The good new is you can do it yourself, but it
may not be very user friendly for a newcomer.

It's possible to create Dutch games with Inform 6, an earlier version of
Inform:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/translations/dutch.html

You can check the translations status of various IF systems there:

http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Rakontointeraktiva

So you can see there are 4 translations of Inform 7 to Italian, Spanish,
French and German, which could help you a lot (I made the French version).

Given the fact German is quite close to Dutch, and there is already a
working Inform 6 version of the Dutch libraries (upon which you could
reuse 80% of the code), so it shouldn't be really difficult to get a
working Dutch Inform 7 translation.

But if you're impatient to write you first game in Dutch, it may be a
bit annoying to have this extra work to do first...

[Otto Grimwald]

On 24/12/2009 01:14, Victor Gijsbers wrote:

> It would be interesting to me to hear from I7-translators how much work
> it is to create a translation.

honestly, it's much easier than it used to be, now that the Inform 7
authors have made several adjustments to help creating such translation.

As a wild guess, I think if there is a working Inform 6 library, it
shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 hours of adaptations for the Inform 7
version.

Last year someone asked for the German version, and a bit later he made
this translation. There are some comments about this process there:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/aa043a4ff126a7a/08b1609e5fa4c104?lnk=gst&q=grimwald+translation#08b1609e5fa4c104

[Christian Bluemke]

On 24 Dez., 01:25, Otto Grimwald

<contact_is_on_webs...@anamnese.fr.st> wrote:
> On 24/12/2009 01:14, Victor Gijsbers wrote:
>
> > It would be interesting to me to hear from I7-translators how much work
> > it is to create a translation.
>
> honestly, it's much easier than it used to be, now that the Inform 7
> authors have made several adjustments to help creating such translation.
>
> As a wild guess, I think if there is a working Inform 6 library, it
> shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 hours of adaptations for the Inform 7
> version.
>
> Last year someone asked for the German version, and a bit later he made
> this translation. There are some comments about this process there:
>

> http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thr...

[Christian Bluemke]

Well, I just can tell for the German extension for I7 (I took over for
Banbury who initially started the project).

We based our work on an execellent translation for the I6 library 6/11
("deform" by Martin Oehm). Though, we have been able to solve the last
remaining problems making all of the features available to the I7
autor only just a few days ago -- more than a year after the first
beta release of the German I7 extension.

For those who want to have a look at what we are up to right now,
here's the public beta release of version 2 of the German extension
(GerX) for I7:

http://www.pageturner.de/adventure/inform7/Test/German.i7x

We hacked many parts of the parser, made new text substitutions,
provided a collection of understand tokens and finally found a way to
make it easy for the author to define changing genders for synonyms in
addition to the object's main gender (in German, every thing can have
a gender -- and even more than one gender, depending on the synonym
you're using).

I don't know Dutch very well. But I guess it's not so different from
German. So I think if Yuri's translation

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/library/translations/dutch_inform_6-11.zip

is in working condition -- it could be possible to create a Dutch
extension for I7. It would take some time, though.

[Christian Bluemke]

On 24 Dez., 01:25, Otto Grimwald
<contact_is_on_webs...@anamnese.fr.st> wrote:

> As a wild guess, I think if there is a working Inform 6 library, it
> shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 hours of adaptations for the Inform 7
> version.

Very wild. In a language so different from English, you stumble over
problems every minute. Make it 2 or 3 months -- at least ;-)

[Victor Gijsbers]

Otto Grimwald wrote:

> But if you're impatient to write you first game in Dutch, it may be a
> bit annoying to have this extra work to do first...

I would strongly recommend to get some experience writing IF first,
either writing Dutch IF using Inform 6 or English (or German, French,
Italian, Spanish) IF using Inform 7.

Translating a library is not an advisable first step in the realm of
writing interactive fiction. ;)

(If you want to tackle it anyway, be sure to let me know.)

Regards,
Victor

[Karel Krabbel]

> I would strongly recommend to get some experience writing IF first,
> either writing Dutch IF using Inform 6 or English (or German, French,
> Italian, Spanish) IF using Inform 7.

Thank you all for the replies. Seems like there is a pretty active IF
community out there :-)
Based on your suggestions, I will get some experience with Inform 7 in
English first. Maybe I can help with the Dutch translation afterwards.
I'm a software engineer so it's no problem if it is a bit of a
technical process.

Regards,
Karel

[Otto Grimwald]

On 24/12/2009 02:15, Christian Bluemke wrote:

> Very wild. In a language so different from English, you stumble over
> problems every minute. Make it 2 or 3 months -- at least ;-)
>

In your German extension, in the 7500 lines for the extension itself (if
we remove the documentation), there are 1800 lines written specially for
inform 7. In those 1800 lines, 200 are for handling some other extra
extensions (vehicules and locksmith), and many are also quite easy to
write, even if it can be a tiresome process, such as: Understand
"kletter auf [something] [darauf]" as climbing. etc

So 1600 out of 7500 is 21 % of the total which was totally rewritten,
the rest could be directly taken from the I6 version. I don't say you
didn't rewrite this I6 part too in your German extension, but if the I6
version is good enough, I'm sure after just a few hours you can get a
working Inform 7 version for Dutch. If the Inform 6 version didn't
exist, it would have been another problem.

I almost didn't touch the parts taken from the Inform 6 French
extensions for my part (I have quite the same ratio in my French
extension, 930 / 5400, which is 17%), and the I6 extension was the part
containing all the problems related to the language, fortunately the
guys who worked on it made a good job.

[Christian Bluemke]

On 24 Dez., 18:34, Otto Grimwald

Technically, you are right. The first version of the German extension
was created in only a couple of hours. You could write a small game
and compile it. The result was desastrous. This is partly because the
deform library changes some concepts of parsing. Many features of the
original I6 library were not available to the I7 author, quirky
messages appeared all over the place, list writing was imperfect -- in
all, it worked, yes. But writing a whole game with it, no thanks.

My goal was to make writing as easy as possible for the author. And
for that, we had to come up with some new ideas. This was what took so
long -- more than the coding afterwards. I suggested things, people
tried it out, sent feedback. (For example, replacing the default title
and headline seemed trivial at first glance. It took us three days in
the end.)

If I understand the comments in your French extension correctly, you
left some work for the author to do, like adding commands and
replacing remaining english messages. We tried to offer a maximum
translation of the library (some things generated in the NI-compiler
can't be translated) -- in order to make it a smooth ride especially
for newbies. Some of the details were really hard to spot.

So, yes, you are right: A translation can be made in a few hours. But
I still doubt that it would be fun to use. Anyway, I wish anybody who
tries to make a Dutch extension luck and patience. By the way: How
long dit it take you to create the French extension?

Thanks for your thoughts -- Happy Holidays!

[Otto Grimwald]

On 25/12/2009 00:31, Christian Bluemke wrote:

> If I understand the comments in your French extension correctly, you
> left some work for the author to do, like adding commands and
> replacing remaining english messages. We tried to offer a maximum

In the past a few error messages were still in English, but I think I've
corrected almost everything that was remaining. Maybe some are still
there, but I haven't encountered them during my beta testings (I've
written 7 games in French and Inform 7).
About the basic build-in commands, all of them are working 100% like in
the Inform 6 version. It's just (if I remember well), since not all of
them are converted to the I7 syntax and are still included as I6 data,
it's not possible to change the default behavior. But I await feedback
from users and could speed up this conversion if this extension had more
users and requests.

> By the way: How
> long dit it take you to create the French extension?

I can't really count. Certainly more than 3 hours, also at the beginning
it wasn't officially supported in I7 so it was rather more a hack of the
English libraries. With the Spanish teams we exchanged our tips so it
helped much. I spent also quite much time to change a few secondary
tasks (such as support for hours, displaying "par" instead of "by" in
the heading and such). I also adapted the extension to every new version
of Inform 7 and added support for other persons and tenses (4
alternative are supported : 3rd person singular in present, in the
past, 1st person singular in the present and in the past)

> Thanks for your thoughts -- Happy Holidays!

Thank you, for you too :)