I recall discussion on needing to decipher languages in the past. Would be neat I think and reinforce that whole "Your Tribe is Incredibly Important" feel that Soulbound is trying to go for.

I like the idea but I also think it's a little early for stuff like this because we don't know yet how interactions with NPC's work.

NPC's are planned to pass on infomation that they hear, and regardless of a different language, if you hear a foreign language being spoken and they say the name of something you recognise (eg your town), you'll recognise that being said. The NPC probably can't understand the foreign language but they can pass on the rumour along the lines of "a foreigner was whispering about TownA"... other NPC's could see this as suspicious and it spreads mistrust about people speaking foreign languages.

However, human error when typing is all to common, or it can be done on purpose to disguise what your saying.... so it's unlikely an NPC will have some sort of auto spell check for what people are typing... if no NPC can tell what people are saying, then having a system where they pass info on is pointless. This kinda hints at having a sentence generation engine for people talking in local chat... with perhaps multiple choice options. I can't see how NPC's or OPC's can pass on information what they hear real players saying without that kind of system

Other chat systems that are closed and/or private, like for example "Guild Chat" or "Family Chat", thats somewhere the system you suggested works, but since it's closed chat, there's no point in having a roleplay system like hidden foreign language, because it should be assumed that you all know each other already.

Hmm, thinking about it though, for written languages, a jumbled up text system would work perfectly.... though my preference would be an anagram system, where each word is an anagram of itself.

So "Hello stranger" might become "Lehol Nerragts". This way you could probably work it out if you really wanted to, but probably not ;)

As much as I like the idea of being able to obfuscate your chat from players who don't speak your native regional language, I have two major concerns with the idea of dynamic chat "translation", which both stem from the same general problem: instant translation of arbitrary human input is a very difficult thing to accomplish, bordering on fundamentally impossible. While I do love the idea of being able to bar people from being able to understand what I'm saying to a nearby tribemate, I think there are serious issues with even trying to achieve active translation of player chat that could undermine the entire language system as a whole.

Let's take a step back and first look at two things that we know are planned to be part of the language system: NPC speech and discoverable lore texts. The key thing to realize about both of these is that they're known constants - SBS knows what sort of things NPCs are going to want to say, and will have directly written any lore text that exists in the game, so they can design these systems around the language mechanics themselves. Knowing what needs to be translated in advance, as opposed to trying to translate arbitrary input on-the-fly gives them a huge amount of freedom to do a really spectacular job creating a set of really rich, immersive languages that bring out the flavor of each tribe. That's the main reason why I absolutely love the fact that they're planning on including tribal languages in the game. The possibilities are really spectacular.

Now let's go back to the translated player chat idea and examine how it might work. Let's say that, for example, if you wanted to talk in Brudvir, you'd type "/brudvir <what you want to say>". I think the ability to do this is actually super cool, provided that it's handled in the correct way, but unfortunately the only way I can think of to implement this that doesn't lead to a rat's nest of other problems is simply to replace the player's text with "<speaking in Brudvir>" for anyone who doesn't understand the language being used. Perhaps you could add a chance to have the message displayed normally if the character has some knowledge of the language, but that's about as far as I'd go with it. It's not entirely realistic - I'm not fluent in Spanish but I can still pick up the gist of a conversation I overhear - but unfortunately making it any more complex than that introduces serious problems.

For one, what happens if a player uses a word that the game doesn't recognize, or makes a typographical error? What if the player isn't chatting in English? The system may know that "apple" in Kypiq is "itywei", but what happens if it runs into "aple" or "manzana" or "삭화"? Leaving it in place breaks immersion, but replacing unrecognized words with random gibberish that looks like it belongs isn't really that immersive, either. What if the player types in something truly nonsensical like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"? The entire prospect becomes a mess really quickly, and that's just for dead-simple, dumb-as-a-brick word replacement which isn't even close to true "translation."

The second concern I mentioned having, which I sort of just alluded to, is that "dumbing down" the languages to allow them to be more easily encoded to on-the-fly actively harms the immersion of the other systems language is included in. In linguistic terms, the languages would become what are called "relexifications" of English; essentially, they're word-replacement ciphers, not languages. With no offense intended for OP, that's what his original example is. Each word is directly replaced with its equivalent, and they remain in order, which basically makes the end product just look like jumbled English. Try to plug that into the NPC speech system, and all of a sudden every NPC in the game has essentially turned into the Swedish Chef. There's no depth or flavor to it, it's just a "code." Lore texts lose their gravity because translating them becomes as easy as Ctrl+F'ing the word list on the wiki (or, hell, writing a script to do it for you) and then the entire language system becomes meaningless and superfluous. No Man's Sky's language system was absolutely shit on because it fell into the exact same trap of trying to pass off unconvincing, meaningless gibberish as a "language," and I reaaaaally, really hope CoE doesn't do the same. That's why I'm in the camp of sticking to predictable input like NPC speech and discoverable texts, and doing a solid job of actually engineering languages that encompass the flavor and culture of each tribe; having good languages implemented in well-executed ways will have a much bigger impact than having bad languages implemented in areas of the game that they really don't need to be. That's just my two cents... or $5 perhaps, given the length of this rant. ^.^

I like and dislike the idea of different languages. I like it, especially in creating 'tribal unity'/conflict sense (And I agree with not mixing up English) though, I can see this becoming a frustration as the game begins.

Perhaps, at a later date, if the GMs wish to implement a 'language barrier' they could have a 'Tower of Babel' incident by the deities - (Especially if we, the players seem to be doing things the gods might get miffed by) by that point, there would be a solid player base, and a reasonable lead-up to such an event so it would just be an interesting plot twist.

Other question I would like to know it how IR languages could affect to the in game language system. I mean, if SbS make something like assign for example apple as "tuta" to kypiq people, if someone who use their IR main language could write another word and the system do not recognise it.

It's complicate to know how in game languages would work but I trust SbS will find the formula :p

Anyways, do you think is possible that depending on your family - after launch - you could know more than one language because your tribal inheritance?

I used to play a MUD game where people of a different race/culture had a different language, now, everyone could speak basic english, but if you made a choice to speak in a different language and someone didn't know that language it would come up with something like:

"Rokatsa says something in Elvish that you don't understand,"

and that would be the end of it, it would come out as english to anyone else who knows the language, but people who didn't would see that line.

Posted By Rokatsa at 4:35 PM - Mon May 01 2017

I used to play a MUD game where people of a different race/culture had a different language, now, everyone could speak basic english, but if you made a choice to speak in a different language and someone didn't know that language it would come up with something like:

"Rokatsa says something in Elvish that you don't understand,"

and that would be the end of it, it would come out as english to anyone else who knows the language, but people who didn't would see that line.

I like that, and honestly I'm pretty sure it's the only solution that's even remotely feasible. Even boiling it down to the absolute simplest version of "pseudo-translation" possible, the problem is still astronomically difficult to solve in anything even approaching an adequate way.

It's estimated that the average educated English speaker knows upwards of 10-30 thousand lemmas (root words,) and that's not even counting inflections, like walk to walks, walked, walking, walker. Add those and it means you'd have to create literally hundreds of thousands of unique words for each tribe just to be able to translate English chat. That's absolutely insane and is in no way a reasonable or worthwhile benchmark for SBS to pursue, especially when the end result would still be crap. Without advanced NLP (natural language processing,) which is a problem space that humanity hasn't yet solved, much less a single game development studio working with $2-3 million in contributions, you'd still be looking at every single language being a pure relex of English. "Lead" as in the metal and "lead" as in the opposite of follow would translate to the exact same word in every single one of the languages, because without actually understanding the structure and context of the sentence, the system wouldn't know which one you're using. Look at how incredibly awful Google Translate is for most languages, and that's fricking Google with their billions of dollars of resources. I think anyone who claims active chat translation will be a thing in the game is seriously misjudging how incredibly titanic such a task would be.

Posted By Daedhel at 6:55 PM - Mon May 01 2017

Other question I would like to know it how IR languages could affect to the in game language system. I mean, if SbS make something like assign for example apple as "tuta" to kypiq people, if someone who use their IR main language could write another word and the system do not recognise it.

It's complicate to know how in game languages would work but I trust SbS will find the formula :p

Anyways, do you think is possible that depending on your family - after launch - you could know more than one language because your tribal inheritance?

in this sense a sentence generator of some sort would help people of different languages communicate easier, because the games localisation would display any chat in your own language.

The downside being that you won't b able to have any in-depth conversations with anyone in the ic chat areas, you'd have to save that for ooc chat, but local chat and other in character chat areas aren't supposed to be for random chat along the lines of "i've got to go offline in a few mins for my dinner".... NPC's won't care about stuff like that, so i don't see local chat actually being "a thing" in this game, otherwise NPC's are going to be spreading rumours of IRL banter and other crap.

local chat HAS to be in character chat, or a system of NPC spreading news/rumours is pointless, and the only way to enforce that (that i can see) is to have a chat generator.... like a "fill in the blanks" system.... hell, in the last Q&A (i think) it was said that one of the apps that tells you what your OPC is doing basically tells you what your OPC has said to others. How can you chat to others if your not there, unless your had some pre-made chat responses :D

star wars galaxies did something like this with different languages and it was awesome. You just had to learn the language of another race and a whole new adventure awaited you in those lands.

I am excited on how the contracts will look to different tribes and will they sign them because they communicated through discord, but the contract differs from those conversations. Per the law they will be binded to follow the contract even if they didn't fully understand its content. So I feel language will be a interesting twist to the game and make it worth while to get someone to translate for you or learn those different languages yourself.

Moved the thread here as it's not under NDA and it's a great topic to discuss with the whole community.
Keep it up guys!

For me, I kind of like the idea because it would make things interesting but at the same time, I feel like it should kind of be like DnD in that regard with a common tongue. Like English in our world is extremely common but different races have their own language. Or at the very least, have a common language in each kingdom. A language that everyone is going to be proficient in. Perhaps based on the tribe that rules, or the most popular tribe in that kingdom or region. And everyone, regardless of tribe, will know that language. For example, say the Brudvir are the most popular tribe in Vornair. Or the ruling tribe. Everyone in Vornair will know the Brudvir language even if they themselves are not Brudvir. But those who are not Brudvir may have a second language unique to their own tribe. So a To'resk, for example, growing up in Vornair would know Brudvir as well as their own To'resk language unless they are a ward. You would need To'resk parents proficient in their own language to also know To'resk. If they don't have that level of complexity, I feel like it would take away from the realism.

My other concern with it is this: in games like WoW and Aion where they had characters speak their own language, you had websites that could translate the mess. Or had player made add-ons that translated for you. That is what my fear would be for this game with languages meant to create that extra layer of realism.