I might try to see if I can come up with something to allow for SOV parsing later today. It seems to me that capturing the Japanese sentence and flipping around the parts to feed them into the English parser is a bad idea (unless you’re prepared to write a full-blown Japanese parser extension or something). Since all the verbs will be in Japanese you can write special grammar lines for them such as
Understand "[something] o akeru" as opening.And you can give things a Japanese name property and feed that into the parser:
A thing has some text called the Japanese name. The Japanese name of the mailbox is "Yuubinbako." [you may want to be very tolerant of alternate spellings!] Understand the Japanese name property as referring to a thing.Making sure that you can’t mix languages like “mailbox o akeru” or “open yuubinbako” would take more work, as would switching from Japanese mode to English mode, but I think it’d probably be doable.
Buuuut, converting “Kaori-san, shinbun o totte kudasai” to “Kaori, get the newspaper” may be very difficult. The problem, as mentioned here and in section 16.10 of the documentation, is that the Inform parser can only tell that you’re issuing a command (rather than answering Kaori that “shinbun o totte kudasai”) is that the first word after the comma is a verb (or direction, I think). Since in this case, the first word after the comma isn’t a verb, there may be trouble.
Disclaimer: I’m not so expert, and I don’t speak a word of Japanese so I don’t know what other issues might be raised.