About gender marks...

[JeMaCheHi]

Since the only active translators are Mateusz and me I figured I could create this thread to requesting that gender marks support we talked about earlier...

For Spanish, I'd need that marks to translate suitably the quality of items (Deadly, Worn, Nimbly). To give you an idea about how this works in my language it would be like this

(I'll translate Deadly): For Male -> Mortífer(o)
                                  For Female -> Mortífer(a)

As you can see, I just need to change that (o) and (a) to make the gender. In some cases could be another letter, but it's always the same. I don't know much about coding, but I thought that it could be done with our friendly tokens @whatever...

[Mateusz P-G]

I'm doing it the same way, leaving the gender-related endings in (),
and so does Bubus for the french translation. If you look more closely
at the item prefixes on the gengo site, there's a also couple comments
regarding german translation of such prefixes, suffering from the same
"genderlesness".

Supposedly, this is why another text file called Items is in the making
on that translation site. I guess this will adress the problem.

[JeMaCheHi]

I think leaving that (o/a) is a little rough...

[Mateusz P-G]

Nothing you can do about it for now. Unless of course
you want everything to sound like it was spoken by
Tarzan, lol.
 

[JeMaCheHi]

Hahahaha no way!
What I'm gonna do is to translate every non-gender related stuff. I'm not so fast so I hope that Björn have done something when I reach that translation level.

[Mateusz P-G]

Just realised the prefixes would be different for plural
items as well, so its not only a matter of gender but
also of quantity, say "Nimble Sword" and "Nimble Swords"
won't be using the same form of "Nimble"...
 

[JeMaCheHi]

Yeah, I noticed too. We need a more complex system to introduce those prefixes... I think that using that (o/a) style is pretty rough and I don't like it....

Please Björn, do whatever you can (when you have some time of course n.n") for solving this...

[JeMaCheHi]

How is this going...?

[Mateusz P-G]

I've found another solution in my translation to keep thing right
(according to grammar) without the need to use those (o/a) thing.

I'm simply puting all the item prefixes into brackets and make them
read not "deadly" or "swift" [item name] but "(deadly item)", "(swift
item)", "(charged item)".

This way, there's no need for genders in those prefixes.
Apparently, this is the solution other games use as well, when there's
no way to translate from english (all words only having one "version").

So it looks like this:
You pick up (knightly item) a Dagger.
You equip (deadly item) (swift item) a Shortsword.
etc.

[JeMaCheHi]

That looks pretty odd, Mat... I think that (a/o) marks were better... That new form is like... more complex or something

[swooboo]

Will read this topic later (tldr) but I think Bjorn needs to scratch the whole idea of gender
specification completely, and I think it is both easy to implement _and_ will make future
translation/s easier a task.

[Dweller admin]

Ok, so I need your help grasping what the problem is. Here is my understanding at least:

* An item (noun) has a gender (male, female and in some languages neuter)

* An item can have a prefix (adjective) such as Deadly, Swift or Slow

* Depending on the gender of the item the prefix changes slightly

If the above assumptions are correct we need a way to define the gender of each item and a way to provide different versions of each prefix (one per gender).

Is this correct? Am I missing something?

[swooboo]

Seems right. Still, consider solving the problem by switching to different descriptions:
'swift armor'  -> 'armor of swiftness' ("быстрый доспех" -> "доспех быстроты"). Then,
there would be no need to specify gender of a noun.

[Dweller admin]

Ok, but what about an item such as "Fast Shortsword of Fire"? Would that be "Shortsword of Swiftness of Fire" or "Shortsword of Burning Swiftness" or something else?

[Mateusz P-G]

Moving the preffix into suffix would solve most of the problems with my
language as well when it comes to genders. Just like with this Swoboo's
example.

As for multiple suffixes Bjorn is concerned about, maybe simply add "and"
inbetween?

"Shortsword of Swiftness and Fire" - I know it doesn't sound perfect but
to be honest, it's still better than "(Swift item) Shortsword of Fire" I'm
forced to use right now (which solves the gender problem as all prefixes
relate to "item", so they're always in the same sex).