Thimbleweed Park Podcast #53

Posdcast...yay!

It's just 3am here... oh well....

Cat is still up, dog is asleep, children are down and my wife slumbers gently....

Finished the podcast, looking forward to the next, now I csn go to sleep.

Good night!

I wonder if you can get TesterTron 3000™ to write blog postings. It would be interesting to read his opinion on the game.

It was very dramatic to hear the beginning before the beginning of the podcast!

It's fantastic that Thimbleweed Park will be at E3! :-)

Ron, maybe there's a 3,5 to USB-adapter for the headset you desire?

Ron, do you ask a friend or relative for help with hard math?

I wanted to add my two cents to the "to bleeb Random or not."

I played through Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail recently and that game has one charcater, Peggy, who's a foul mouthed pirate type. Her cursing is partly bleebed out, in the way of that you hear her saying some milder words, like shit etc, but the more fouler words have been bleebed so, that you can almost make out what she's saying. That works pretty well in my opinion, as it also makes the charcater seem fouler.

I just saw, that german Television Hosts Götz Alsmann and Christine Westermann look like the two main characters from Thimbleweed Park:

http://www.wn.de/var/storage/images/wn/startseite/welt/kultur/fernsehen/1852649-tv-show-mit-goetz-alsmann-zimmer-frei!-endet-2016/56539693-4-ger-DE/TV-Show-mit-Goetz-Alsmann-Zimmer-frei!-endet-20161_image_630_420f.jpg

Thanks for another fun podcast! :)

I think I finally updated my voicemail recording enough today to feel satisfied with it, overall. :] Will sound like I've left town. Possibly to never return! :] Leaving you guessing why.

How did you manage to solve the issue with gender of names, if you did? I think that French, Spanish and Italian have all the same issue, since most names of things have a male or female gender. Do you have to rewrite them as single objects in order to allow translators to associate them with their gender and related pronouns? A solution would be to repeat always "this object" as a general expression (or the name of the object itself) instead of the pronoun.

Also these Romance languages have enclitic pronouns (they form a word with the verb) :
- English: "I_can't_use_[it]_this_way" (neuter object, every thing);
- Italian:    "Non_posso_usar[lo]_così" (male object) "Non_posso_usar[la]_così" (female object);
- Spanish: "No_puedo_usar[lo]_asì" (male), "No_puedo_usar[la] asì" (female).

In the classic adventures from LucasArts, in Italian they used male as a neuter gender. They always say: "Non_posso_usar[lo]_così".
Also in English there's only a definite article, which is the same for all genders and numbers. In Romance languages they are different:
El pueblo, la rosa, las plumas.... Then I think that with Scumm they were forced to write every noun with a single entry for the gender and number (there are also single things that are plural, like scissors), or maybe to write them with their article, because the article could be without vowel with many nouns... ([la] rosa - female- , [l']amaca -female too-).

Oh, you actually answered one of my questions in the podcast, so it will be possible to associate every noun with a gender, as a subject and as a object...

Hi Ron,

regarding those male/female bits. Do you have a 1 bit flag that can be set to either male or female? Beware that there is also a group of genderless words in some languages, so you need to have at least two bits to cover three options : "he, she or it"

Also beware that the gender of a word isn't necessarily the same in different languages that have nouns with a grammatical gender. So how does that work, is the translator able to change the gender bit(s) for every object, allowing to correctly translate a generic response like "I don't need  it" when picking up an object? i.e. "I don't need her/him/it." - but then in another language-

To make matters worse, you also have languages where not only nouns are gender specific, but also the adjectives are (most roman languages). So if you have a generic response, you need to foresee a male/female response. E.g. "I think I am in love" would be translated differently in French when said by Ray or Reyes. The problem is that you don't know upfront if a particular sentence needs a complete gender specific translation or if it is just a matter of substituting the gender bit(s) for the "it" reference. Worst case you'd have to foresee two lines for each line of (generic) dialogue that can be used by  two actors of opposite sex.

In Portuguese, even "thank you" is either "obrigado" or "obrigada" depending on the gender of the who is expressing his/her gratitiude (luckily it is not dependent on the receivers gender)

anyway, short recap: 3 genders needed for every object/actor, 2 gender-specific place holders needed for every common/reusable dialogue line (assuming inanimate objects won't talk)

This thread about translations, gender and articles popped in my mind a curiosity, maybe it could be a question for the next Friday-questions-podcast:

Why Largo's last name is "LaGrande" and not "*IL*Grande"? It's one of the Ron's tyops or there is a reason behind it?