Would AI live translation be better?
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One of the problems is that the main use of the NMS alphabet is in signage and posters, where itâs used as much for its aesthetic appeal as for any information contained. In this context, the physical size of the words is important. You couldnât replace two short English words with one really long German one - it wouldnât fit.
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Live AI translation for each player? Or for each patch released? LLMs are not only expensive for business use, but also non-deterministic (that is, slightly different results every run).
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Ok, signage is also often burned into textures, it would be acceptable if there was only one version (English mapping), for the reasons you state.
But I mean learning the language from language stones, so that dialogs slowly reveal more and more understandable words (⌠⌠friend! hello ⌠friend! hello stupid friend!)
Some dialogs give actual hints in dialog puzzles, such as, which resource should you offer to the NPC or which reaction should you choose. Well, at least in English they do. 
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If we keep going down this path, you know what will happenâŚthere will be no words. Just pictures.
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Well thatâs what the Chinese (and the Egyptians) went for. On the positive side, it gives you a language everyone can read, regardless of the language they speak. On the negative side, you end up with an alphabet of thousands - perhaps millions - of letters. Learning to read and write becomes a specialist job, and making keyboards is nearly impossible.
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I mustâve missed something at school⌠
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I am thinking the same. Confusion.
I set up a tablet for an elderly woman a few days ago. At one point during the many updates, the shortcut menu had only icons and no words. I looked at them to adjust a few things and had no idea what most of them were.
Thankfully, the final update restored the description of each button.
Words are needed. English is the most common language. Once translated, people can type it into a translator which works well, mostly, for simple words.
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I didnât say it was easy - I said itâs independent of the languaage you speak. In order to read Chinese, itâs not necessary that you speak Chinese. An English person, or a Swiss, or a Finn, can learn to read Chinese without knowing a single word of Chinese vocabulary. This made it very handy for use in China, where regional groups of people traditionally spoke many, often mutually incomprehensible, languages.
Of course, nowadays near everybody in China learns Mandarin as a second language - but that wasnât always the case. In the 19th century, it was a marvel to visitors that people in two villages could speak totally different languages, but they could both read the same newspapers.
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Oh⌠Honestly, that aspect had never even occurred to me!
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My question was more about the quality of translation.
I have noticed that if Zoom is open, it handles auto-translation to English very well. Russian, Chinese, Korean, Polish, ⌠If I compare on-screen captioning of a Netflix show, for example, Zoom nearly always matches the TV captions. Using another app for auto-translation would, of course, mean no full screen game. 
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I think we are speaking about different things. You are speaking about translating normal English sentences to normal foreign sentences. Iâm sure they can handle that!
I was speaking about the made-up alien languages. The problem was that (note: this is my interpretation, guessing based on the outcome, I donât know if my assumption is correct) translators were never given translatable sentences, they just got words. And that didnât work.
Example: âthe bear is content with the fruitâ is easy to translate. But instead, HG makes a table and maps each English word to a Gek/vykeen/kovax word.
Then the translators get âtheâ, âwithâ, âisâ (untranslatable without context), âbearâ (you mean âto bearâ or the animal or what?), âcontentâ (you mean the content of a box? A book? Being content? Huh?), âfruitâ (you mean the botanical fruit part of a plant or the culinary opposite of vegetables?) and so on.
After learning all the alien words, what I get to see of this sentence is âThe endure are a volume together a plantpartâ or something incoherent like that. 
(Iâm exaggerating.)
And I hope they donât repeat that in LNF.
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Reminds me of when I used Google Translate to translate âcool beans!â (a colloquial expression) into Russian. A Russian-speaking guy replied that the result was hilariously bad.
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Now I need to know how this scene would work in RussiaâŚ
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So the translated sentences from NPCs make no sense to you?
I would think it would be difficult to translate into various languages due to differences in sentence structure.
âThe Traveller is confusedâ might be âConfused the Traveller isâ when translated into a language other than English.
The posters would never work
Traveller in English might be der Wanderer in German.
Itâs easy to see why they stuck to just one language.
The only way to avoid it is to not have an alien word for word or letter for letter translation.
This is one of my favorite features but I can see why others might not be able to appreciate it.
So I say again, letâs hope they donât just use pictographs or something and leave language out all together. I mean, it would work but I have experienced a lot of confusion around what those pictures mean sometimes.
For ages I thought this 
was being silly, goofy. Then I found out it was lip-licking because it just ate some yummy food.
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Totally!
Even adjective placement varies. âwhite roseâ in English becomes ârosa blancaâ in Spanish. Adding factors such as varied placement of verbs would make offering accurate translations based on structures in multiple languages impractical at best.
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The posters wouldnât be big enough to accommodate the letters needed to spell a word in some languages. The words we find at knowledge stones would be fine until they were being used to translate the pre-rendered sentences each NPC uses. Then it would be a garbled mess.
Each sentence would have to be rearranged to make sense in each language and even then, that would require changing which words are used since one word can have completely different meanings in another language.
It would be a hot mess
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The posters would definitely need the localisation treatment moreso than a direct translation just to keep the same flow and aesthetic as the original English versions.
More trouble and work than itâs worth for things that are supposed to be quick, breezy additions for the team. Which is one of those, pros for using AI technology, arguments. It would suddenly become a possibility for a small team to give more weight to these small, breezy, additions; if the tech was in place.
Even if itâs just to get the required materials for the artist, and then a human can make the final call on placement or word/phrase choice. But then theyâd also have to hope and pray the AI did itâs job and they arenât sticking culturally offensive things on them
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I donât care about the posters, 
those are just decorations. Non-Anglophons already expect that fixed text in game textures is English âjust in a different fontâ, they are fun to transliterate, like cyrilics. Itâs just flavour text.
But the dialogs are meant to have a meaning. In these manufactories, you get a crafting recipe when you react correctly, remember? The alien dialog contains a hint, which of the three choices gives me a reward. After I clicked a hundred knowledge stones, finally the revealed sentences gave me an advantage, there was no guessing needed anymore, I could speedrun through the recipes. Yay for linguists! Finally useful! 
But only when I switch the UI language to English⌠Otherwise clicking knowledge stones has no use, it just replaces gibberish by gibberish.
Everyone has a story like âI bought NMS after seeing this video scene/screenshotâ and for me that was the stone with the alien writing (which never appeared in the gameâŚ) I was really hoping there would be some alien language communication minigame.
Hah, yup, lots of people say that. I choose them by the tooltip now, to play it save. For example this 
is labelled âtriumphâ in some apps, but it looks like scoffing to me. Some icons are Japanese words like service, secret, forbidden, etc. What looks like blood types 
means different temperaments. This 
means congrats or happy new year, and one of the flowers 
means âgood job, well doneâ spoken to a small child! Language is a minefield.
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And then the forum tells me I must use words
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