Languages - Idea on breaking a big barrier between some DDO players

[the613]

I am posting this after reading http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=399571 and thinking about simple way to reduce the language barrier between certain players. I have been in quests a couple of times where I couldn't understand another player due to language, and it was at the very least a bit frustrating. I am posting my thoughts here, in hopes that it may help turbine with this issue.

In terms of language, I see 3 areas to look at:

-voice chat
-text chat
-game text

I don't see any way to deal with voice chat issues, so I'll move on and deal with text based chat. The answer, in my mind, would be very simple: use google translate. I looked briefly at google's TOS, and it seems it would be free, though I may have read it incorrectly. I know certain IRC chat clients have google translate built in to them, why can't it be done here?

For game text, it would be a bit more complicated. My thought is contain all the text in an easily edited file, in a clear format. Provide an english file, allowing people to edit this file to use different languages. Also, allowing more then 1 font would be nice, as it will allow languages with characters other then those supported already to be used. Then, when ddo starts, load all the language files, attempt to extract the information, and if such an attempt fails, notify the player and move on to the next file.


These are just rough thoughts on how it could be done. I think allowing people to make their own language files would actually be very profitable for turbine. Once the files can be read, as long as 1 player is willing to make and share a language file for a language, people who speak that language will be more likely to play ddo, and it also takes none of turbine's cash past the implementation.

[the613]

Just something to briefly show how turbine could implement the game text language file:

<langfile>
<lang>(name of language)</lang>
<font>(name of font)</font>
<fontlocation>(location on comp of font file)</fontlocation>
<textdef>
<defID>(some identifier to tell ddo what text this is for)</defID>
<text>(text for this language under this definition)</text>
</textdef>
</langfile>

That's a simple xml file that can potentially hold all the text based data of a game. The only reason I can see for not using such a solution is that there is some text the end user should never see, but then that shouldn't be included in such a language file.