Simulating a language barrier

[Anym]

(Sorry if this has been discussed or covered before.)

How would I go about simulating a language barrier in an adventure game? Say, for example, the main character ends up in Germany, but doesn't understand any German. In such a situation I would like to have German signs and German speaking NPCs for realism's sake. The problem being that I would like the players to be as helpless as the player character, which might be true for the majority of players that don't speak German, but what about those that do? Should I just ignore that fact and force player not to be able to utilize any information they obtained "out of character" or would that hurt immersion? Of course, it could even help immersion if the player is reminded not to forget all "out of game" knowledge, I don't know. However, it reminds me a bit of situations (I dislike) in other adventure games where you (as the player) have long decyphered a cryptogram of some sort and have to fiddle around longer than necessary until the player character "gets" it as well. What do you think?

An alternative would be to replace the German with another language, that seems to be less likely for the players to know (like Finnish, Welsh or Klingonese) which wouldn't solve the above problems (if problems they are), just reduce them to a great extent at the cost of atmosphere (imagine Esperanto-speaking Nazis) or even the game-flow (the character might initially not even know where he is and although he doesn't speak German he might be able to recognize it). Replacing the German with jibberish instead of a lesser-known language, while making sure that really nobody will be able to understand people you don't want to be understood, probably doesn't help the atmosphere either (unless you're able to pull off German-sounding jibberish like "Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer?", which is probably quite difficult to do well) and adds the problem of making realistic and consistent jibberish, i.e. something that really looks like a language and it robs you of an opportunity to make small in-jokes for people who understand the foreign language you chose to use if you intended to do that. So I'm not sure if these approaches are better or worse than using real German.

The above example implicitly assumed an English-speaking character in an English-language game. However, let's complicate matters a bit more by making English the language our player character can't understand, which is the original problem that made me think about this language issue in the first place. If the game is in English the main character will obviously have to speak English as well, regardless of which language he "really" speaks in the context of the game world (be it Latin, Navajo or Russian), but what happens if our character encounters an English-speaking character or even an English computer terminal? How can we illustrate that it's supposed to be that it's supposed to be a foreign and imcomprehensible language while at the same time making clear that it's supposed to be English? I using another font, another set of colors, markup (writing everything in brackets) or a different style (using "thou" or even "j00" instead of "you") enough? If so, which is preferable? Or is that too little to simulate a proper culture shock? Or how would English-styled jibberish look like? Even if you don't speak German or French, you know what it sounds like (to someone who speaks English at least), so you can make up jibberish that sounds a bit like those languages by taking some common (and probably well known, even to foreigners) words and mix them up with made up ones, taking liberties on the grammar, like in the above example (from Monty Python by the way). This is much less effective if you know that you're audience will know the language you're trying to imitate and you have to make it similar and different from proper English at the same time. On a positive note, treating English as a foreign language gives us more possibilities as well, as you know that the player will obviously know English if he's playing the game in English (as opposed to the minority of gamers that would know German if it were to appear in your game), so you could even use that as a device to deliberately insert information in the game that might be interesting for the player, but not necessary for the player character, for example the motivations and thoughts of the English-speaking characters. However, you might also want to hide some knowledge in "foreign" dialogue which the player character has to decypher somehow in addition to or even instead of just revealing additional (bonus) knowledge, which brings us back to the problem at the beginning.

So, on a sidenote, I'd also like to ask if you find it hard to seperate between "in character" and "out of character" knowledge in adventure games, a question that implies further questions like how much physics (or language) knowledge can be expected from a player and the question if all knowledge the player will ever need (including physics, for example) should be contained in the game itself. Any opinions?

[MrColossal]

As far as signage is concerned, you could just make each sign small enough or at such an extreme angle to the player that they can't read what it says and it just shows up as symbols that resemble writing. When you look at them have the player say "I can't read the language!" Or something.

Then you could just write out phonetically what german sounds like and not use actual german for conversations. Maybe?

[Adamski]

Recent forum activity might suggest that Babelfish would be a good way to approach this.

[Mr Flibble]

In the episode of the Simpsons where the Germans bought the plant, there was a lot of German spoken, but it was obvious that the Americans couldn't speak German.
But when that episode was transmitted in Germany, the German characters were replaced with Dutch ones.

A similar thing happened with Otto, from Malcolm in the Middle.

[Radiant]

In the episode of the Simpsons where the Germans bought the plant, there was a lot of German spoken,

"Sie looken smarten todayen, sir"

There wasn't that much German in the episode at all

I think the best way to simulate it would not be displaying the literal content of the signs (etc) but the protagonist's interpretation thereof. For instance, in Zak McKracken, when Zak reads the sign in India he says "I think it's a brand of cigarettes" (whereas Annie says "it rather obviously says 'jail'").

[Helm]

I don't see the problem with the player understanding the german but the player character not. Would even give room for amusing stuff. An adventure game can work without relying on meta-knowledge so much. If it's engrossing and fun to play, it's not a big deal.

[cpage]

What I have done in the past was actually have the characters (german) attemp to speek english, But it is such broken english that the player has no idea whats going on.

It may not be an option for your application since you said you like realism but i just thought i'd mention it.

also if you want an example of broken english that is impossible to understand just look at the posts from the forum member Rolf
EDIT: here are some examples
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=22375.msg329502#msg329502
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=26087.msg329450#msg329450

[Tiki]

I think the best way to simulate it would not be displaying the literal content of the signs (etc) but the protagonist's interpretation thereof. For instance, in Zak McKracken, when Zak reads the sign in India he says "I think it's a brand of cigarettes" (whereas Annie says "it rather obviously says 'jail'").

Never played Zak, but that gave me a good idea.  It doesn't partain to this particular discussion, but I thought I'd say it all the same.

If there's a game with multiple player characters, perhaps to one character it appears as gibberish, or the sign says "cigarretes", but to the other, knowledgable player character it says "Jail".

I don't know, I just found that intriguing.

[aussie]

The authors of "Asterix and the Goths" had to solve exactly the same problem.

They simply used a German-looking font (one of those old gothic types) for German speakers, while Asterix and the rest of characters "spoke" in the normal font.

To the onlooker, who is reading everything in the same language, it soon becomes obvious that each font represents a different language.

Here's an example. I couldn't find a better one, but you get the idea.



(*) AGS features a SetSpeechFont function (or something similar anyway). In fact, I think I've actually used it in the past.

[seaduck]

Cocktel Vision's games are also quite inventive in this field.

In their games (Goblins series, and in Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth) all the characters (including the player characters) speak a language that is alien to the player (and completely fabricated). Actually each character just repeats a few syllabels over and over). But it works and so all characters are voiced, and yet all the voices takes just a few kilobytes of data. From Gobliins 2 onwards, the speech is subtitled in a special subtitle window at the bottom of the screen, so that the player understands what the characters say.

In Woodruff and the Schnibble of Azimuth,

Spoiler

the player character undergoes an accelerated growth from a baby to an adult, and consequently can't READ. So he won't read the signs (which are btw written in a fabricated writing and probably don't have any real sense) until he finds someone to teach him how to read.

[close]

[Sektor 13]

Problem with set speech font is , that you would have to change it every time main characters says something, and that is often.
Or is there possibility to change font for each character ?



I think you should use symbols for what should be "foreign language". Or the Klingon language would do the job fine, P'tah !.

[Ali]

You could try something like the way the adults talk in the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Though "Whorbwhorbwhorbworb" sounds better than it reads.

Alternately, mightn't it be possible to create an interesting situation where the player can read English signs but the player can't. Then the player would have to find away of getting the character to understand.

It would be similar to my experience of Discworld Noir, where I solved the 'AZILE' puzzle before Lewton, and then had to work out away of getting him to solve it. It was quite fun, if a bit like meta-gaming.

[Anym]

Thanks for all of the good suggestions so far. I really liked the idea of using fake speech with subtitles for one language (I still remember Gobliins 2's intro very fondly: "Ratilno ratatilno..."), especially when used in conjuction with real (English) speech for another. Unfortuntely, using digitized speech means a lot of additinal work, but it might be worth it.

Having NPCs attempt to speak the PC's language (and fail) might also work very well, but is limited to situations where the NPC could know the language and know that the PC speaks that language. In my latter example (with English as the foreign language) I was more thinking of first contact scenarios and even in the example with German as the foreign language there might be circumstances where that isn't an option, for example an escaped POW, who has to try to find his way around without garnering too much attention.

And for using a different font, does anyone know for sure if I can set a specific font for each character? Having to switch all the time doesn't sound too inviting. I only need to think of some good lines or situations to make it absolutely clear that the two fonts are supposed to be two entirely different languages (and of course I'd need to find two or three designs that are both readable and distinctive in low-res).

[Radiant]

Woof woof arf woof.
Woof, Lechuck, yip yip, woof.
Woof.

[Charity]

To foreignize the game's "native" language, you might try using a cryptogram of some sort.  This would A) make it easy to believe the player character can't understand, B) allow you to keep the language's basic structure (and even allow for well written lines for the garbled characters) and C) prevent the player from understanding too easily, while allowing dedicated players to decypher the code and gain some non-essential meta-knowledge.

(This seemed to work okay for Final Fantasy X.  Though I suppose in that case probably neither language was literally meant to be one of ours.)

Just be careful what you write in the cryptogram, because some people will see it, and others won't.  You won't want to hide a major plot twist behind the language barrier, for instance.

If you want to discourage (but still kind of allow) translation, you might try also to speed up the text for the foreign speakers, so that it disappears quickly.  Have you ever noticed how fast people sound when they're speaking a language you don't understand fluently?  It might be a good way to help convey/exaggerate that feeling.  I imagine that wouldn't be any more or less difficult than changing the fonts.

If you're serious about not giving people time to read it, though, you'll want to watch out for the GUI.  I know that the built in Seirra style GUI, at least, can be used to pause the game while characters are talking.  (I do that all the time when I can't read fast enough.)

If you want the player to invariably know what is being said, that font thing sounds like a pretty good idea.  However, I think it would be a little disconcerting.  For me, at least, it is a lot easier to imagine fonts as accents than whole languages.  I suppose one would get used to it before too long, though.

[Lionmonkey]

I think, I've seen a couple of games using the Narrative method. Here's an example:

You press talk on an accountant. But since this characters speaks a language, you don't know, instead of speech text, a message is displayed: "Judging by the intonation, the accountant asks you a question. You manage to recognise "telephone" and "Berlin" in the stream of yiffs and throat clearings, unfamliar to you, due to you utter laziness at the German lessons."

This will let you give the player protagonist's point of view, while simultaneously keeping the game serious.

[Snarky]

A lot of the suggestions, while cool, don't really achieve a solution to the problem Anym described. (Some do go a ways towards it.)

I think that to achieve this specific effect, what you present to the players shouldn't be "objective reality", but reality as the character perceives it. So if the character doesn't understand German, they would perceive the spoken language as a rapid series of unfamiliar noises, with perhaps the odd comprehensible word. So I would just write a bunch of garbled, German-looking word-fragments. ("Ichzwei nochbarheitganz stumfelt!") For written things, you could maybe make a Fraktur version of some foreign alphabet, like Greek or Cyrillic. That way, you would have a set of symbols that look German but are completely incomprehensible.

The other alternative is to run the actual sentence through Babelfish a few times, via different languages, before finally translating to the target language. The result is pretty much guaranteed to be gibberish, but should look convincing to a non-speaker.

[Andail]

(Just wanted to throw in a warning here that Lionmonkey performed a 2.5 year dig-up, so while contributing to this thread may provide food for thought, it's probably not very useful for the initial poster.)

[TerranRich]

What the hell? I had a well-thought-out response, only to notice that this thread is over 2 years old. What are you doing, Lionmonkey, seriously?

[Kumpel]

Sorry for necroposting but this one poster tried a similar thing I am trying.

Here is what I worked out so far trying to simulate a language barrier as being a refugee who is coming to a save country. The player is confronted with phonetic foreign language when speaking with native characters. But the game has several time jumps where the player has achieved some learning sucess. But how do I show that to the player? I could mix up the dialogs from thereon with two languages but that looks weird and could confuse the player much more than it should, I guess. My alternative idea is the following:

While a native speaker is talking the few words the player yet understands are decyphered a short time after being shown in phonetic l. via some kinda decyphering animation. Maybe this is way to elaborated but is that even doable in AGS without the effort of designing dynamic sprites of game fonts moving around and stuff? (But what isn't? )