Hello! Sorry for my english.
It is possible to translate MUD to another(russian) language?
I mean translate all player messages, commands(except imm's commands), all spells(names, messages), rooms, etc, etc?

dut said:

Hello! Sorry for my english.
It is possible to translate MUD to another(russian) language?
I mean translate all player messages, commands(except imm's commands), all spells(names, messages), rooms, etc, etc?

It'd be painfully time consuming, and the person doing it would need to be pretty close to fluent in both languages, but sure, it can be done. Just go through each file of source code and change everything being sent as output to a russian equivalent and then go through all your area files and change everything from english to russian and then double check your other distribution files and make sure you hadn't missed anything, and then recompile and enjoy.

Been seeing increased interest in internationalizing the output text from muds. Makes me wonder if there would be sufficient interest in doing something similar to what forum code does with language packs. It would be incredibly laborious and time consuming even just to generate an English language pack, but once done it would be alot simpler to then produce others if someone were really willing to invest the time.

I suppose you could have a function that fetches a string from a language file and returns it to your standard printf functions?

char * get_localized( const char * message, const char * localization)

where you put in some common message like CREATE_CHARACTER_SPIEL and localization like EN and you get a character creation spiel string from the english language pack back as a pointer to a string.

Such a system would make it easier to edit the things the game says without compiles. That'd be nifty.

The language packages would likely be organized into an associative array (easy to do with PHP, harder with c, STL maps for c++?)
Assuming you weren't going to drag STL into AFKMud how would you go about making the language files interact with the codebase? You could link them up as structs with key and value elements, but that'd be fairly slow I would think.