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gettext is a widely used generic solution to facilitating translation in applications. Not the translation itself obviously.

You basically use coded keyword strings in place of the text and tell gettext to translate those, then in actual translation files you have the actual translations of those keywords.

The benefit of using a pre-existing solution like gettext is that a lot of things have already been thought about and implemented, and a lot of developers and perhaps more important translators will already be familiar with the way it works and the associated syntax.

Ooooh! Shiny!

This is a nice idea, and would go a long way towards easing the difficulties for multi-lingual corps & fleets. It kind of reminds me of the functionality in Google Chrome, where you hover over a bit of text to see it in the original language... but reversed in this example.

Any chance of a Localization for English as opposed to the default of American English?

Lets go through these - as a lot of others have voiced the same.

1) Translating locally - well, depends. Different parts of the game work in slightly different ways. But our goal is that you will only see text in the chosen language. So if you are using an english client, you will ONLY see english texts, similarly for other languages.

2) We actually got part way to this, but uncovered a heap (technical term there ) of exceptions that confused the issue and are complicated to fix. If we are given some time we'd like to get back to this, but no promises.

3) Right now, as we've said, we're not translating types, locations or NPCs. We're trying to work out how to deal with incomprehensible text though. гибель or 運命 mean nothing to english speakers - just a string of shapes that might be hard to differentiate from other strings... Now think how some japanese or russian speakers might think about english text if they are not comfortable with english?

My native language isn't English but it is (or should be) the world's common language. If you don't know English you are missing out on a lot of business opportunities.

I would be interested in an example of a SF novel you would consider a good translation.

This.

The rest of the world uses metric. Learn it.

English speaker here have only been involved with international corps.

What if there were varying levels of localization? A lite translation would have only info tabs translated but attributes and commands would be in English. This would mean those users would recognize jump commands when the fc calls it. They would be able to discuss things like tracking issues that mostly happens on attributes tabs. A japenese lite version might use Japanese characters to spell the English pronunciation. Include a full translation option but the lite version would help with full language integration.

That's a germ of an interesting idea, I think.

Rather than a "lite" mode, I'd suggest a "fleet" mode, that would use the English terms (or perhaps a selectable language) , but have the mouse-over show the native language.

If the FC is speaking English, I'm not sure it would really be helpful to have the "english pronunciation" in Japanese characters. Japanese, being such a strongly syllabic language, really rather mangles the English when you try to force English into it. Any sequence of consonants generally turns into a whole series of syllables, and a lot of information is lost due to the limited selection of consonant sounds to begin with.

There are a grand total of 50 basic syllables, plus 20 hybrids, in the entire language. That's it.

So what works with German or Russian may not work so well with Japanese. I don't have any modern data, but I strongly expect that the typical Japanese Eve player would be quite comfortable with roman letters (romaji) for English terms. You'll find them everywhere from technical literature to advertising. Typically, they only get converted to katakana when they start to become integrated into the language. For example, シェア for "share".