Continuing the discussion from Onward to the Spring thing!:
That “selectable” makes me think: Could it be realistically doable to have one single IF game that can be played in different languages? Would it be too much work? Are there formats that make this easier? Maybe Gruescript?
“The Master’s Lair” offers both English and German in a single Windows executable, however it’s a custom made engine.
It depends on the engine/type of game you are doing.
It’s super easy to make it happen in Twine/Ink/ChoiceScript (essentially you have a language choice at the start). I’ve done it for multiple of my own games.
Parsers… I’m not sure. Probably possible by messing around with the engine and system responses, as well as the synonyms for commands. Usually though, you’d have different file per language.
That sounds good. I, too, think that full parser games are bad at this. I think Gruescript might be easy because it’s less work to double an item name (which is clickable) than having to deal with double room descriptions. But that’s just my assumption.
My first game was entered into Spring Thing 2006 as both a Dutch and an English game. I just provided two game files, that worked fine. (This game was in Inform 6 and compiled to the Z machine.)
To “The Master’s Lair” must be added:
Yes, it is realistically feasible to build a bilingual version of an interactive fiction. In any case, my home-made solution works quite well.
However, the effort involved is not insignificant.
On the one hand, there is the translation itself. The idea that you can leave this completely to an AI is unfortunately completely wrong. Without a lot of editing and manual work, it will always be awful. (I’ll have to make some improvements to my game)
In addition, the syntaxes are sometimes completely different, depending on the language. Even a simple “unlock door with key” looks completely different in German, for example: “schließe die Tür mit dem Schlüssel auf”, which literally means “close the door with the key up” in English. (I have left both options in such cases. Nobody has ever complained that this gibberish is understood) There are other weird examples, I’m afraid. 
My example here is German. Other languages have other peculiarities. In other languages, the adjective comes after the noun, or verbs have a gender (screech!).
Incidentally, the entire game logic remains the same, which is why you can switch at any time. For whatever reason you should do that.
Bottom line: doable, but time-consuming! I still believe that the approach is not so bad, because it can probably be optimized. What I somehow didn’t like at all is that with IF in my native German, I actually only have a maximum of a dozen potential players. That’s probably no better for Spanish or French authors. The multilingual approach is hopefully a way out of that.
For Inform and for English/French, @Natrium729 has an extension to switch between French and English in the middle of the game.
Would never do that.
The different syntax/grammar is ok (I guess). What worries me more is the semantics. For example in German “lock” and “fortress/castle” are the same word.
I imagine a underlying world model and the langusges ontop of that?
I’m surprised by this. I assumed all three mentioned languages have active, strong, productive communities.
Yeah, you could basically just put a command to switch the language, or you could design a game where the language is part of the gameplay (say, one English-speaking protagonist and one French-speaking).
Inform has a very specific way of handling languages, so there are some hacks. It’s 6L38-compatible only (and not really up to date); I’ve got the feeling it would be more difficult or even impossible to achieve with Inform 10.
Also, it should be possible to have the same thing for, say, English-Spanish, but more difficult if one of the language is not English, and very likely impossible to have more than 2 languages. (Again, because of the way Inform handles translations.)
Other authoring systems, like Dialog, don’t handle languages in a specific way, so entirely doable. But a lot of work still.
Bedquilt is going to be architected with i18n support in mind from the beginning, although I don’t expect a usable release of it to be out in time for anyone to get started on their Spring Thing entries.
uhm…
give me an hour or two and I’ll whip a conceptual example.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Here it is: two words of explanation:
The text is in Italian, but the parser is the very english one; on paper this led to an extreme “guess the noun” (but I have put the Italian synonyms here) but the general idea is that the .en player can cut& paste the text into goggle translate, inputting the commands in english.
of course, appropriately, is “Cloak of Darkness”, the rosetta stone of IF languages…
cod2lng.t (10.7 KB)
(how come that the intfic file upload don’t accept the .gam files ??)
cod2lng.zip (27.5 KB)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio