Is there any chance @zarf that you’d be willing to give some hints at this point?
I can’t speak for Adam or the other thread participants: but if there are allusions to Zork, Adventure, or other works that we’ve missed and would help finish off the translation, I’d prefer to continue with hints rather than abandon the effort.
I did actually look at Emily Short’s translation a couple of weeks ago when things started to drag. She approached the text (particularly the grammar) as if it’s written in an unknown natural language, so some of her interpretations don’t fit with our assumption (strongly implied to be correct by @zarf) that it’s more like an encoding of English. Interestingly, she has TAKE ALL=“water bottle” despite not having SEAT=“fire” (she has SEAT=“stone” and TURN, which we think is “smoke”, as “dragon”, so pouring water on the stones somehow causes a dragon to appear).
I had a look just now at Matt Fendahleen and David Welbourn’s translations, but neither of them got as far as we have, and there aren’t really any ideas there that we hadn’t considered already. Neither of them have a translation for TAKE ALL. I do note, however, that, despite it being a hapax, everyone translates SNOOSTO as “kissing”.
There’s a reference to another translation attempt by Admiral Jota. I’m not certain if this is the translation I remember contributing to back in 2001 along with some of the other ifMUD regulars, but I’m not aware of any surviving records of it.
Tantalising, Matt Fendahleen mentions that @zarf supposedly shared the full translation with Emily Short at some point, but that doesn’t help us much right now.
That one doesn’t surprise me; there aren’t a lot of default Inform verbs that would be AMUSING but completely useless to apply to an animate enemy.
I just wish that verb could be useful to our translation efforts somewhere else!
I asked Jota, and he found his notes!
https://grunk.org/temp/lighan2.txt (original untranslated)
https://grunk.org/temp/lighan3.txt (translation)
https://grunk.org/temp/lighan4.txt (vocabulary)
Interestingly, Jota also noted that the maze should be the one whose passages are “all different”; but this led to dead ends in several other places that we translate as similes.
Ooh!
(Would he be up for them being preserved longer-term?)
Yup, he’s fine with a more permanent backup if you like.
Yeah, this inconsistency bugs me a little, but “the spell FONN in your mind PREL a GORONG” and “a spell which SITIN PREL ALL ZAOKNEB” make perfect grammatical sense as similes if PREL=“like”, whereas I can’t see how they make sense at all if PREL=“different”.
Jota’s translation is further advanced than most of the others but still less complete than ours. He has TAKE=“key” but no translation for ALL, and agrees with us on TURN=“smoke” and most of the details of how the final monster fight plays out, including LERUL=“poison”. He has VOLT=“head”, which works fine in “filling your head with …” and works grammaticality with VOLTO (“heading”) being usable as a noun, but I still can’t quite make sense of the initial room description in that light.
Oh, wait, except is “heading” a name for a specific type of tunnel in a mine? A quick web search suggests maybe but I can’t tell how common this usage is. Is “a wide pit that cuts deep into the heading” something that would make sense to a miner?
It’s listed on Wiktionary, which makes me think it’s reasonably common (as opposed to the OED, which has some truly obscure meanings).
Once access has been gained into the coal seam, workings are developed by mining a series of roadways (or headings). These roadways are tunnels largely, if not totally, within the seam, usually rectangular in shape though on occasions they may have an arched or even circular profile.
By this definition, though, a pit cutting deep into a heading feels odd to me.
On the other hand, I have no better idea for how VOLT and VOLTO could be related. GARST is pretty certain, but what do we think about PARO at the moment?
I am still fairly convinced by PARO = PA + RO = “into”. I did independently suggest VOLT/VOLTO = “head”/“heading” earlier as my best attempted guess, but I agree that it’s not super great.
Given we’re pretty certain about PASE=“in” and RO=“to”, I think it would be baffling if PARO was anything other than “into”. CARAB is a hapax, though; is there a better translation than “cut” which would make that sentence more reasonable? And we guessed OLET=“deep” based on OLT=“high” but I think there’s some wiggle room on that one too.
One more very minor thing which I think we should pinch from Matt F’s translation: the word KOUNAM appears on the stock certificate and in the construction ZAO GU-KOUNAM …? in the post-game choices. He suggests that KOUNAM could be “enjoy”, making the menu prompt “would you enjoy …?”, which seems like a plausible idiom for “would you like to …?”