Lost in Translation

EverQuest II currently runs in five languages: English, German, French, Japanese and Russian. However, all of the programmers and designers actually build the game in English. To accomplish the translation, we use a proprietary SOE library: the Text Translation and Templating Tool, or T4 for short. T4 is a very powerful tool that allows us to do translation through anything from dictionary lookups to macro expansion. Our Internationalization department (i18n for short) is responsible for maintaining the T4 library and the various language modules for it.

Unfortunately, sometimes we write things in a way that isn't easily language-agnostic. Take the following example for instance:

"Rothgar's Touch of Pestilence critically double attacks Autenil for 38 disease damage."

It's a common bit of text that appears in the combat chat when you're fighting in EverQuest II.

Let's break it down a bit.

First of all, there's the actor performing the action. This can be you or someone else; Rothgar in this example. There's also the target which can be you or someone else; Autenil in this example. There's an optional spell name (Touch of Pestilence) and how much of which kind of damage. Oh, and the action -- double attack in this case -- and actions may or may not be critical.

With the way T4 works with insertion macros, we use a base string like this:
"^1 $2 critically $3 $4 for +5 $6 damage"

But this really doesn't work, at least not for anything but English. That pesky verb needs context in other languages to be conjugated properly. We currently put in either "double attack" or "double attacks" based on who the source and target actors are. It works fine in English but comes out in other languages like gibberish.

The way to fix this is to build base strings that include the verbs, but this can explode quickly. Say there are five different verbs that could be used in that case. To make base strings that include the verbs with all of the other possibilities you end up with about 640 strings, and that's assuming that there is only one damage type (EQII allows multiple per attack).

In the end, I went with using a generic verb for non-English languages ("hit") and put special attacks or critical status parenthetically on the end:
Rothgar's Touch of Pestilence hits Autenil for 38 disease damage. (critical double attack)

This will be much easier on our translators and will make sense for our players. It's been a long time coming.