Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-27200931-20170429185624/@comment-25101089-20170429191616

This comes up a lot, as I'm sure you all know. The main issues with making speech translatable are:

1. Unlike item names, biome names, etc. speech is randomised. When you talk to an elf it doesn't look for a specific speech line, it looks for a random line from the 'elf_friendly' pool. So this can't be translated using the basic language file system.

Now, that would still be something we could work around by creating a new system, like you suggest. Perhaps. Except that...

2. Speech is server-side, not client-side. Combined with the randomisation this means we can't make it translatable: say that I were to change speech so that it sends 'elf_friendly' to the client and then the client picks a random speech line from this, there is no guarantee that two clients would pick the same one. There is no guarantee that two clients would even have the same size speech pool, for that matter, so I can't trick it like that. This isn't even a problem with different languages, but with making speech client-side (which would be required for translation).

So an elf might say something, and one person would see 'Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!' whereas the person next to them would see 'Hail, Eärendil, brightest of stars!' That might not seem like a huge problem - but in the future, where we have quests eventually and speech matters more, it would be a problem, and I'd rather not lay the groundwork for problems like that.