Clash of the Cantrians

[Bigato]

yep.. I found difficult to stay in a community where, me player, don´t understand the language... I tried, but while the char should have learned to speak, after 20 years, surrounded by other language... Me player didn´t, and my char is getting quite sad and sleepy, couse of the arduous interaction...

Meanwhile for trading, i found it fun, for small periods of time is just great, to arrive somewhere and change items, and maps and names... Music is perfect...

I enjoy, when getting someplace and playing instruments, and the other char answers with music... I love that!

[Zanthos]

when my polish zone spawned english character died, i had the writing skill of an english speaker who looks up words in a dictionary, so long as I had a dictionary in front of me. I learnt things like "Dzien Dobry" and the like, but thats all i remember now, a mere couple of months since he had a tragic heart attack.

[SekoETC]

And that map was supposed to be for selected people only! Damn Cantrians, always making copies of everything...

Switch encoding to Cyrillic (Windows-1251). Well, the next step is to learn to read Cyrillic... or to find online help. Originally I was using the chart in Wikipedia but then the Russians in Cantr shared a link to http://translit.ru/ which changes text from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet and vice versa. Although there is the problem that the page itself is in Russian, so originally I had to use Babelfish to translate the buttons, but now I've started to remember which one is which.

"Privet ! Menja zovut Wariag" - "Hello, my name is Wariag"

"Otschen prijatna Haney Hunter" - "Nice to meet you H.H."

Morkowka - carrots

If you stumble onto my location, there should be lots of ingame dictionaries. Although the original one might not be so accurate - I found out that it translated iron as the kind of iron that's used for ironing clothes! That was hilarious but my character couldn't get the joke since Cantrians don't have that kind of irons.

[CantrFreak]

I'm trying to start up some crazy stuff between two languages.

[J. Scott]

Cyrillic characters...that reminds me...

I've a character spawned somehwere near the Russians (or so I suppose), and most of the text comes out quite garbled, as my computer isn't set to interpret non-English characters.
Now, when I type out a string of that garbled text (say, for instance, my charcter has a dictionary, and I copy and paste the word for "hello"), will that text be read properly by the Russian player's computer?

[SekoETC]

At least when I manually switch to Cyrillic encoding, it doesn't mess up regular Latin characters. The Russians in my location read and write Latin alphabet no problem. I was even thinking that maybe I should ask my character to switched into that language group but then I realized that resource names might get troublesome.

[Oasis]

I can't figure out how to write accented letters, etc. Trying to write Portuguese, and tried to switch the language of the computer, but I still can't find the ones I want, even though there are some there.

[SekoETC]

If you go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options, select subtab Languages, click Details, then you can add extra keyboard settings.

[Oasis]

Yes, this is what I've done. But I can't find the accented e or a. These are the only extra ones I can find. ~~ ª Ç º ç Most of the others are in different positions than usual, but still the same symbols.

[Cherize]

Besides the Polish pirates who killed everyone in Port Gallagher, the Polish characters that I have come in contact with are most gracious and friendly.

But even on those islands, I have come across dead towns. Makes me fear for the future of Cantr.

[Mr. Bones]

I would also like to see more social interatction between language groups. But the usual scenario that I've seen is the foreign character says a few sentences and gets the mass "I don't understand what you said responses" then gets frustrated and leaves. Most people don't seem to want the hassle involved and go on about their own buisness.

[Yosarian]

Heh...what you need to do is to find a "English-Russian dictionary" note.

[psymann]

I really don't care for the intermingling of the nationalities - I'd far rather they were kept completely seperate and couldn't interact.

This is not due to a hatred of foreigners, but due to the gameplay.

If, in real life, some Polish man who couldn't speak English turned up at my house asking for directions to the train station, something like this might happen:

Pole: [says something in Polish]

Me: [looks confused since can't speak Polish]

Pole: [holds out train ticket, makes train noise, points both ways down the road, shrugs, and looks expectantly at me]

Me: [looks at train ticket, smiles with understanding] Train Station? Train? [makes train noise as well, gets out a pen and draws a quick picture of a train]

Pole: [nods and smiles]

Me: [points down the road in the correct direction]


But in Cantr, that can't happen. You just get annoyance happening, like:

Pole: [says something in Polish]

Me: [emotes looking confused in English]

Pole: [can't understand the emote and emotes looking confused in Polish]

Both: [reach stalemate]


The two times I've met foreigners, it's been wholly frustrating. I am clearly going to want to communcate in actions, but I can't describe those actions as I can only describe them in a language that the other person doesn't understand.

It doesn't work, and it's no fun as a result.


-----

The exception is when the foreigner can speak fluent English, and therefore you _can_ both emote in English and understand each other. That works fine.

Another version of that that works well is if an English player in the English area creates their own language that is not part of our real-world language from anywhere, because again, then they can emote it in English, and it can be learned by people realistically.

But random people turning up who can't emote in the same language as the rest of the people on the island doesn't work for me.

psymann

[CantrFreak]

I'm used to not being able to understand many languages in real life. I was born and raised in the US, my parents were born and raised in India so we both grew up with totally different languages. I never learned to understand my parents speech (though they can speak English and Gujurati, one of the languages of India) and I can only understand bits and pieces of it.

In real life you can also use expressions on the face to understand people.