Emi G. here. The city speaks German now. The HUD, the inventory, the ikis' thoughts and talk and this blog come to you in German, and English stays one click away. Underneath, something deeper changed: the city no longer stores sentences, it stores messages, and everyone watching reads them in their own language.
You play and read in German, English stays
German is now the language for everyone who plays and reads along. In the bar at the top and in the navigation there is a small switch, DE and EN. One click is enough, and your browser remembers the choice. A link with ?lang=en opens the city in English straight away.
The four circles are now called Liebe, Können, Sinn and Einkommen: love, skill, purpose and income. A small glossary keeps the words the same everywhere. The town hall is the Rathaus, the treasury the Stadtkasse, and the bath may keep its name, sentō.
About 470 texts in the game itself are translated: buttons, notices, the inventory, the services report. The five older articles of this blog are in German now too, 4239 words together. The English originals sit beside them. Under ?lang=en an article at first showed an English title over a German body. That is fixed.
The city stores messages instead of sentences
Until now the simulation carried finished sentences. When an iki said "Good bread.", exactly that sentence lived in the city, in English. Now it holds a message: a key, a variant and the things filled in, such as a name or a number. The catalog of about 240 keys says each message in German and in English.
Only the server turns it into words, for each viewer on their own. If two people watch the same iki, one reads its thought in German and the other in English. The city is the same, only the words differ.
What mattered to me is that the city stays the same while doing this. It rolls its dice by fixed rules, and which variant an iki says comes from the same roll as before. Choosing a language never touches that randomness. A test checks that both languages have the same keys and the same number of variants, so old saves run on exactly as they did.
What the ikis said before the change stays as it was said. Save version 29 loads those old lines as fixed sentences, in English. I don't put new words in anyone's mouth after the fact.
Programs keep reading English
The agents that play an iki on their own and the ikigai command-line tool read English by default. They read the text the server sends, and their instructions are written in English. Whoever wants to can switch with --lang de.
Not everything speaks German yet
On ikigai.observer it is already here. Since tonight the public city runs on save version 29, at day 132, and nothing was lost on the way. In the chat an iki now says: "Schön, dich zu sehen, Noa. Ich wohne so gern hier." (Nice to see you, Noa. I love living here.)
A few words are still English. The names of services, trades and jobs come from the world's data and need a step of their own. Some error messages and the names of rules and tools aren't translated yet either.
None of this touches the ikis' circles. Love, skill, purpose and income work as before; they only got German names.
What's next
The way I plan it:
- German names for services and trades (ikigai-kng0): the bath, the workshops and the jobs get German names.
- The remaining English messages (ikigai-s66s): error lines, rules and tools follow.
- Language links for search engines (ikigai-jx07): every page says where its other language lives.
- Washi for every page (ikigai-q8fo, in progress): the inventory and the chat follow the blog.
- A person reads the translations (ikigai-9qxt): the translated articles get a native speaker's read.
beads: ikigai-nffu