I last got wind of Gargoyle right around Y2K, when he released the public registration key. I did find his previous home base in Australia, with a note from an apparently angry Sysop demanding that nobody bug him about Mark Sinclair nor Arrowbridge.

Anyway -- does Scott Adamns hang around here? Longshot used to run a board in Jacksonville FL. Its internet feed went down and he kept it running as a dialup only. I played AB2 IBBS there for a while, then he took the board down altogether, and I lost track of him.

I bring him up because he wrote a couple of third party things for Arrowbridge (certainly II, and I think also I), and maybe he could help me deal with the record structure or something, give me some hints how to tease out the last of the English text to where I can substitue another language.

Having worked out most of it in Esperanto, the same menthods would work as well
for other languages, so long as no one piece of text overflows the space allowed for it -- for example 10 letters (or whatever characters) for each key word or _brief_ phrase recognized by the NPCs in the Taverns.

Inidentally, I've written a brief little routine that selectively swaps files when the player enters, to select which language will be active. That means for
example that a caller playing in one language can challenge someone playing in another language to a duel or joust.

Of course any message sent to another player will still be in whatever language
it's sent in, I didn't create any AI routines to do translations on the fly, but still -- why waste space on my disk installing separate copies of the game just for the purpose of keeping separate batches of players separate, when it's
more fun for them to be together?

Hmmm... when I run it that way, only one language can be active at a time. If I
had it set up multinode, I'd have to either lock out simultaneous players, or run separate installations after all. Well, I suppose I can run my own little IBBS setup, each local "different" board, really just differnt subdirs on the same BBS, for different languages. My BBS already has a local message area for
Esperanto, already configured as a subboard, with however much I want to make it different from the main board
-- different primary local file list, for example, certainly different bulletins -- anythig where text can turn up just begging to be translated.

If I did do AB2 in additional languages, it wouild be something I know at least
halfway well -- probably German, many Swedish or Spanish -- probably not American Sign Language, kinda hard to write that in ASCII
<g>.

I'd be willing to work with someone else to translate other lauguages. If nothing else, this Esperanto translation has further strengthened my own grasp of the languauge. There's nothing else quite like spending lots of time trying
to figure out how to translate all sorts of words and turns of speech perhaps not common since since days of yore, except in RPGs, to stretch the fluency muscles in my brain.... though reading La Hobito (The Hobbit) came close. :=)

PS: I did not attempt to duplcate it when M.S. got terms like "hath" and "hast" mixed up, just corrected it where practical, and as the archaic words piled up, eventually dropped a lot of them altogether. -- Though
it is possible to say something like "Thou" in esperanto, I most often gave that a pass, going for the equivatlent of "you". Since I know of one word of Esp-o that would cover "thee", "thou", and perhaps other things, it soom sounded tedious and awkward to me, so after a bit I went easier on some of the archaisms. To be playable, I can't overwhelm the player with excesses of phraeology that no-one really uses -- and in Esperanto, never did use as a living language, created only to allow for something like literal translations where that is considered critical to the extent possible -- the Christian Bible, for example.

No lenghty translation can ever be absolutely literal for very long, or it wouldn't really be another language. Fairly soon, judgement calls must be made to try to match a similar style, where there either isn't a literal equivalant at all, or it would be very misleading in the target culture -- or where there are two words in the target language for one in the source, or vice versa. What's the difference between a ship and a boat, for example? In some languages, nothing. Or between "know" )be familiar with a person" and "know" (be cognizant of a fact, or fluent in a skill)? In many languages, they are completely different words. And those cases are fairly clear cut, other things
just don't have an easy way to pick; ya just gotta get a feel for what the original is, and imagine what the author would have done with it if he'd known and used the target language.

There was one famous old tale of a bible translator who once had to grapple with (someone's) "heart will be made white as snow", to an african language and
culture that had never heard of snow, and didn't have a word for it. Should he have tried`will be made like crystals of ice"? Even if there was a word at the
time for ice, and that were judged to be as literally close as it coudld get --
it clearly would not do! He settled on "as pure and white as the inside of a cocoanut".

Genius!

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag
* Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)

When's the last time anyone was in contact with Mark Sinclair?

it has been a very long time since i've heard from mark... i don't even know if
he still has the source code to ABI or ABII or if it will even compile any more... the last contact i had with him, he pointed me to a web based version of a new game that was similar to AB... i played it a few times but was under-whelmed with it... can't even recall the name or URL for it now...

I'd like to discuss putting the finishing touches on my
translation of AB2 into Esperanto, both to get official blessing
on the project, and to help me past a few remaining obstacles to
tidy it up and hit a few spots that are still inaccessible for translation.

Other than that, I've really aready done the bulk of the work. It's
very nearly read to go as is.

i can only wish you luck in getting hold of him and getting something done with
your project... a google search may turn him or his new game up... i think that's how i found him before unless it was when he logged into my BBS... but as i say above, that's been many years ago... i'd guess at least 5 or 6... maybe more...

)\/(ark


* Origin: (1:3634/12)

When's the last time anyone was in contact with Mark Sinclair? I'd like to discuss putting the finishing touches on my translation of AB2 into Esperanto, both to get official blessing on the project, and to help me past a few remaining obstacles to tidy it up and hit a few spots that are still inaccessible for translation.

Other than that, I've really aready done the bulk of the work. It's very nearly
read to go as is.

--- BBBS/LiI v4.01 Flag
* Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)

Re: Translations
By: Rick Ekstrom to mark lewis on Tue Jul 27 2010 12:56 pm

If I did do AB2 in additional languages, it wouild be something I know at le halfway well -- probably German, many Swedish or Spanish -- probably not American Sign Language, kinda hard to write that in ASCII
<g>.

hehehe I am deaf and use ASL hehe we should make ascii art of signs... hahaha ---

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Re: Translations
By: Rick Ekstrom to mark lewis on Tue Jul 27 2010 12:56 pm

If I did do AB2 in additional languages, it wouild be something I know at le >> halfway well -- probably German, many Swedish or Spanish -- probably not
American Sign Language, kinda hard to write that in ASCII
<g>.

hehehe I am deaf and use ASL hehe we should make ascii art of signs... hahaha ---

:=)

Sounds like fun.

If you're serious, we should talk.
Do you have the files for running
Arrowbridge II? There are seven
ANSI pics in that, some of them
have text which I've converted to
Esperanto.

I can do some conversion between ASCII and ANSI that would be tough for lots of
people, and I can modify existing pics of both sorts, but I'm not as
practiced at gernerating large scale original pics. I'll let you do any freehand ASL or fingerspelling images for a first draft, then I can help you polish them into shaape.

Oh, if you want to translate the entire rules file for AB2 into ASCII pics of ASL? I'll cheer you on, and good luch with that. It's about 60k. I *could* maybe be talked into doing doing to dress that up, but it would requre making a
major project of it again, and somebody else to do the first draft.

--- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-1
* Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)