Inform - Resources - Translations

About Translations  

Complete  

Dutch  
French  
German  
Italian  
Lojban  
Slovenian  
Spanish  
Swedish  

Manual Chapter  

About Translations

A translation of Inform is a set of modified library files allowing interactive fiction designed with them to communicate in a language other than English. The Inform parser has been carefully written to minimise its reliance on any one human language, and in principle only two library files need to change in order to change language: the Grammar.h file, not surprisingly since it contains the definitions of the verbs known to the game, and the language definition file, which specifies linguistic information such as the number of genders, how pronouns are written and what they imply about meaning, and so on. (The standard Inform library comes with a language definition file called English.h.)

The example game Advent, the Inform version of the Crowther and Woods classic, is often translated to each new language as a full-scale test of the system (and because it is worth translating for its historical importance). These pages also contain links to download Advent in various languages.

Interactive fiction in languages other than English runs on the same interpreters as for English, so players need no special software to play, say, German Inform games.

For some languages there is a choice of translation available and, if so, please use whichever you prefer.

If you're interested in how language definition files work, or considering making a new translation of Inform, the place to start is Chapter V of the Inform Designer's Manual (see links to the left).


Last updated 24 December 2007. This site is no longer supported; information may be out of date.
Maintained as a historical archive by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. Copyright 1993-2018 IFTF, CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
This page was originally managed by Emily Short.