The Other Language Problem

[Gorobay]

For some of the ages we write, we might decide to have people living there. And since this is Uru, some of these people will keep journals. Of course they won't speak English, or any other surface language. How are we going to make the journals understandable? It would be useless to have them in a totally new language without translations, but if we do "translate" them, there is the question "How did you learn the language so fast? You only wrote the age a few days ago!" So what are we going to do about that?

[Whilyam]

I thought about this, and I noticed that Atrus never had any issues with learning a new age's language. It's possible that the Link "picks" an age where the inhabitants speak, or know how to speak the language the writer speaks or at least makes any life forms speak a learn-able language (and not interpretive dance, etc.)

[Gorobay]

Possibly. I think it's more likely that it picks a language that can be understood but not the one of the Writer, since Channelwood, Riven, and Narayan had their own languages. Either that or it is truly random and so far we have been lucky enough to find cultures with easily-learned languages.

[Trylon]

Well, I think we're free to imagine solutions to this on our own

A number of possibilities I can imagine:
- Use translation of the language as a puzzle element (can be fun)
- Just have 'em speak and write English for convenience (like most sci-fi stories do)
- Provide translated journals in the game (perhaps next to the originals if you care to write those)
- Write a babel-fish into your age
- ...
- ...
- .... (Yeah limited imagination ) ...

[Pryftan]

If it's a discovered Age, this problem is solved pretty easily by saying the natives were made to learn D'ni when the D'ni linked there to trade. (I can definitely see the D'ni refusing to learn the languages of any natives and imposing their own language upon them.) That way we can either say the natives ended up writing everything in D'ni, which we were able to translate, or we found a sort of "Rosetta Stone" between D'ni and their language that let us translate it. Otherwise, unless we get to communicate with the natives in person, we won't be able to have any point of reference to translate from.

[Erik]

Isn't this topic aimed a bit too high?

We are just learning to build a proper Age, and we're already talking about having natives in them. The Age needs to be really good to contain natives. It must be really realistic and there must many details. Think of Riven.

I think it will take a while before we are able to build an Age that can handle a civilisation to live in.

Just my 2 cents.

[Kierra]

*shrug* it never hurts to think ahead.

This is the kind of stuff we have to learn to think about in Age Building if we ever want to make quality ages.

~Kia