Suggestion: Learning a language while playing 2004scape

Development
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Hi, thanks for making such a great server. I have recently moved to Germany and am trying hard to learn the language. Is there any chance that you could give us an option to play 2004scape in a different language? Ideally all dialogs, objects, npcs, menu titles, etc would be translated. This would be a massive help for me so I really hope it happens

P.S. It would be even more helpful to have as many definite articles as possible e.g. for objects, npcs, etc, so we can learn the gender of each noun. Learning these is really hard! For example, mithril sword would be “das mithril Schwert” which indicates it is a neutral noun

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This is a cool idea but I suspect it would be a monumental undertaking. There was a German translation of the game fairly early on that perhaps the devs could look into implementing, but translating all text from scratch would take quite a long time, and of course it would not be authentic, which arguably goes against the goals of 2004scape.

More personally, if I were translating the game, I would want to translate it most faithfully to the original, so your idea of inserting definite articles for learning purpose would mean being less faithful of a translation, since the original game text doesn’t do that (and, arguably, is misleading in the case of “the mithril sword”, of which there is more than one).

Ultimately, the purpose of 2004scape is to preserve history, not to teach languages. I think translating the game could be admirable with the goal of accessibility (letting people experience RuneScape who never had the opportunity due to language barriers), but changing the substance and character of the game specifically to teach a language would be a step too far.

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I wonder if it’s as-simple as replacing English plain-text with another language?

Like Longsword to 大刀, that showing in-game, casually replacing various text like this over-time on a public Git, and if someone understands the language better and suggests a different word, GitHub makes it pretty easy to collaborate and fork. Someone using an online translator would probably make some hilarious initial stuff, but it’d serve for learning when someone suggests something better!

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The only technical issue I can foresee is things like NPC dialogue being pre-programmed with the number of interfaces (click to continue) and that needing to change with longer- or shorter-writing languages. If there are no technical barriers and it turns out to be easy to make a language pack, I’d gladly translate RuneScape to toki pona for the lulz.