I was thinking of this as I read the thread about expanding Uru's audience to other countries with different languages.
If we link to an age we have just written, and there are inhabitants in the age, their language would be foriegn to us. So the problem is how do we overcome the language gap that will ever-grow as Age writing expands.
The truth is, if someone who spoke Dutch wrote an age (as is the case with Jonae), they would speak and write in Dutch. So my experience with that age is the sames as if all this Uru and Age stuff was real. I'd walk into their age, and it's all in Dutch! Good for realism. Not so much for accessibility. IC wise, the only plot device that would seem to work relatively okay is if the writer 'conveniently' translated their personal journals for us. Better than Star Trek's universal translator maybe, but barely. And I don't think we can use Farscape's convenient translator microbes in Myst. So either it's a distortion of reality, or some sort of far-fetched story device.
I could say "in New Mexico we speak English, the DRC speaks english, and most explorers do too..." which is generally true. But then I could be terribly mean and say "...if you don't like it, tough. Learn English." Now if that were actually done (to the exclusion of those speaking another language), anyone who didn't know English would be forced into a position that if they really wanted to know that information, they'd need to manually translate the written/spoken content of the game.
What I'm proposing is similar to such a concept (without the being mean part). Instead of putting players in a position of manually translating content (which many people would not be willing to do, myself included), we could have what I guess could be called (for lack of a better name) an "Instant Tanslation" dictionary or device.. or whatever you want to call it.
Basically it's like having a dictionary of the known languages in Uru (meaning human (english, french, japanese, ect) and well known non-human languages (D'ni, narayanese, rivenese (well maybe not rivenese)).
If you really wanted to you could sit down with something written in Latin (Lorem Ispum maybe?), and translate it word for word using a latin-english dictionary, or AltaVista's babel fish.
This device would be nothing more than an instantaneous version of sitting for hours translating something. Storywise, it be as if you did the work to translate with a dictionary and a lot of time. OOC and in respect to the fact that we are playing a game here, it would save *lots* of valuable time that many players may not wish to spend in such a pursuit. Particularly when it comes to human languages. Most of us real fans are willing to translate D'ni, but if something is in italian, and it's not Cyan, I'm really not going to be motivated to translate it. Thats when I whip out the handy-dandy Instant translation, and POW! Now I can read a translation in English.
And as far as character and voice info, it could be like EoA, where the 'speeches' are written down, and then can be translated to your preferred language.
So you'd have a little book down by your Relto book and Journal that would be your overall Lexicon of languages.
This Instant Translation idea will be majority useful for international users with other languages, as it provides a reasonably okay IC and OOC way to get that information into another language. And it can also be used for Non-human languages, but only in the case of learned languages. So if you have *just* linked into an age with natives, it wont do you any good. IC wise..
Technically speaking though, the translations would have to be prepared before the ages release by whoever made the age. Unless we want to incorporate babel fish into Uru.. Which is not a great idea.. lol..
This idea greatly implies that Cyan would have to be the one to incorporate such a feature, and each age would have text info for each language that an age supports. Whether that would be in the pak files, or a separate text file, I don't know.