Translating to Agglutinative Languages

Modding Translation and Localization
1

Hi there.
I decided to translate the game to Turkish because this game’s Turkish player base is going to be quite young in my opinion.
Since this is the first translation ever that I’m trying to make, there are some issues about it. Not umlauts, files or programs that I use, but translating to a agglutinative language is a problem.

But, what is a agglutinative language?
Agglutinative languages are languages which use affixes, suffixes, prefixes and circumfixes to change a word’s meaning and grammatical function.
i.e. Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish.

…so?
In Turkish, some suffixes change depending on the last wovel of the word that it’s attached to. But don’t be confused about “changing” here, suffix’ meaning stay the same.

Let me show you an example, first line of latest en.json I have.

chasing [name(data.target)]
is going to be translated to
[name(data.target)]'i kovalıyor

See that “'i” (pronounced like “ee”) right after the target’s name? That’s an accusative over there.
Check this link to see more.

That was going to be grammatically correct if our target’s name was Helen, Sayid, Kim.
But what if our target’s name is Murdock?

I’d have to change that “'i” to an “'ı” to have a grammatically correct sentence (it’s meaning doesn’t change), yet I can’t do it since there is only one line to determine the translation for every name that the game will create randomly.

How do I find a way out of this? First I thought of changing the names in a way that my translation won’t be grammatically wrong. But this would limit the game.

Any suggestions from experienced translators? Or programmers, to change the whole json file.

2

hey there @MeanTails, welcome to the discourse :smile:

i know next to nothing about the translation stuff, but @Wiese2007 or @yshan can probably help out here.

1 Like
3

Ok there is no Option at the Moment… In german there are the same issues but only at the end of words so that i add the extra Symbols in an ( ). So perhaps if it gives the it Form in türkish you can try it with this?

2 Likes
4

Crab, thanks. I’m hoping to see @yshan’s opinions on this soon. :smiley:

It’s not about the form or symbols @Wiese2007, thanks anyway. It’s just a general problem about translating to Turkish.

If the problem was about the last wovel of a name, I’d have a programmer friend to find a workaround for it.

Like,
if [name(data.target)]'s last vowel is "e"
chasing [name(data.target)] is [name(data.target)]'i kovalıyor
if [name(data.target)]'s last vowel is "a"
chasing [name(data.target)] is [name(data.target)]'ı kovalıyor

But it gets complicated more and more if there are no consonants at the end of the name.

And the solution I just told you could be done with only Turkish names because you can’t predict the pronunciation of a word which is English. And my obnoxious consonants change depending on the pronunciation. :disappointed_relieved:

I’d better get to work and translate what I can and wait for a workaround for this.

4 Likes