What features do you want for playing in other languages?

Diplomat
1

We are working on making some improvements to the experience of playing the game in other languages soon. Some of the things we are thinking:

  1. Hover over things like hero, moveRight, and while in the code to see a tooltip in your target language.
  2. Show translations of those pieces of code in the docs and item descriptions.
  3. Add the ability to translate the transactional emails that get sent out (welcome to the site, forgot your password, etc.)

Some things that we are thinking we would do later, but not now:

  1. Add translations of audio files.
  2. Add an option to ignore the English method names entirely, so maybe you’d write 敌人 = 英雄.找最近敌人() instead of enemy = hero.findNearestEnemy().

There are also a few open issues relating to translations that we are not sure how to prioritize. So I wanted to ask the community:

What are some of the most important things we can do to improve playing CodeCombat in other languages?

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I would find the ability to load comments in more than one language at a time useful. This would allow my students the ability to read directions in English and their home language and would allow me to be able to read the comments and figure out what they are trying to do if they were playing in a language other than English.

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Interesting! What do you think the user interface would look like for seeing comments in multiple languages?

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The simplest way would be simply to write secondary language comments under primary language comments:

# directions in language 1
# directions in language 2

hero.say('starting code in language 1')

# further directions in language 1
# further directions in language 2

It would also be useful if the help screen had extra tabs for help in the secondary language.

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Hmm, that would alter the line numbers, though, which we use for a variety of things. Would it be helpful to add hover translations for the comments (back to English), too, or not so much?

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Hover translations would be useful if there were more options than English. At our school, there would be a strong preference to have the students see the English text first and then having the hover options for their first language if they couldn’t understand the specific direction.

I am not sure how difficult that would be to implement.

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The current method of reporting translation errors is quite cumbersome, there are quite a few in dutch, and it’s the main reason i usually prefer English (on any website, because translation is so often done wrong).

Also, i updated the github file, but the individual levels, which also often contain errors, are not found there, so how would you even suggest improvements for individual levels?

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If you want to fix another language that has problems on the website itself, you’ll want to edit and pull-request on GitHub.

If you want to fix a language in the game, you’ll want to visit this page and find where the problem is: http://direct.codecombat.com/i18n

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Thanks, I’ll look into it. I’ll just play in English because Dutch is too hard to understand sometimes (I’m a native Dutch speaker btw).
When I have some spare time I’ll see if I can fix some of it.

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Hello, as a fellow programmer , I strongly suggest codecombat shouldn’t do:
敌人 = 英雄.找最近敌人()

Reason is that there isn’t actually a Chinese programming language exists (or will exist) that is decent or popular (not as I know of being a programmer for 20 years).

Even Chinese programmers and programming in English, therefore, I think CoCo should handle language/translation same as the real world (use i18n or use a string to translate).

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