[MUD-Dev] Internationalisation: The effect of Tongues in virtualsocietes

[Derek Licciardi]

From: Ghovs
> Peter \"Pietro\" Rossmann wrote, among other things:

> It has always been so that english was the main language on the
> internet, as evidenced by such cultural expressions as spam, spam,
> spam, spam and spam (oh, and banner ads). Most commercial efforts
> on the web are either by companies with a very local product (in a
> local language), or by companies with a heavily international
> orientation (english).

English is the standard language in many other places as well.
Flight traffic controllers use English globally to conduct business.
Journals of medicine and published scientific reports also use
English to publish internationally.  While some scientific work gets
published in other languages, as a work gains steam in the
international community, it will inevitably be translated to English
to gain a broader appeal.  On the Internet, English seems to be the
standard, which makes sense considering the Internet's roots in
academia which is responsible for the scientific and medical
publications mentioned above.

Oracle Corporation made a run at building a multi-lingual database
to break down the English centricity of the Internet.  It failed to
meet that goal because real-time conversion was too large of a task
for the company to handle.  Frankly I don't believe it can be solved
yet.  To try and do something in a MMO with a fraction of the budget
doesn't seem too likely.  At best, I think you'll see what you do
with DAoC, nationalized servers run by separate live teams.
Unfortunately, that means that the vast majority of games will
require other language speaking players to adapt their language to
the English alphabet.  This is not hard for romantic languages but
more difficult for all others and next to impossible for asian
ones. Failing this, a player is left only with speaking English.

Derek
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev