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Start of Chapter 27: Extensions |
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§27.27. Translating the language of play
The "language of play" is the natural language used to communicate with the player at run-time: this is normally English.
That means that it is difficult to write, say, Spanish-language IF using Inform 7, though heroic work by the Spanish IF community has overcome this. Inform 6 provided for translation by isolating its linguistic code in a part of the I6 library called the "language definition file", which was normally "English.h". Translations were gradually made to most major European languages, resulting in alternative language definition files called "French.h", "Italian.h" and so on. Full details on how to write a language definition file were given in the Translations chapter of the DM4, that is, the fourth edition of the Inform 6 Designer's Manual.
In I7 the system is different. We use the template, not a library. Instead of providing a language definition file such as "French.h", a translator should create an extension called something like "French Language by Jacques Mensonge". (The language should be named in English, so "French Language by ...", not "Langue français by ...") This extension should then contain broadly the same material as an I6 language definition file, but written in a mostly higher-level way. See the extension "English Language by Graham Nelson" supplied with I7, which is included automatically by default.