Mage.tra Female version

[Jazira]

Hello DavidW,

While updating the french translation of SCS, me and Gwendolyne have come accross a few lines in mage.tra linked to the Wish spell like this one :

@1212 = ~It shall be done, my master!~

Since Gwendolyne is far more competent than me i prefer quote him.

"There's still a big problem with the mage.tra file: you'll have to add the strings of version F for the scripts. But as you should be able to use the Wish if you're not CHARNAME, it poses a coding problem (you have to detect the gender of the person casting the spell), I left it pending."

Is there something you can do about it ?

 

[DavidW]

I’m not sure I understand. In modern English, ‘master’ here is gender-neutral. (At one point, ‘mistress’ would have been the feminine form, but that’s archaic and has sexual connotations.) 

[Jazira]

1 hour ago, DavidW said:

I’m not sure I understand. In modern English, ‘master’ here is gender-neutral. (At one point, ‘mistress’ would have been the feminine form, but that’s archaic and has sexual connotations.) 

Sorry, i forget to add that in some other language, especially in french, there is sometime 2 stringref to translate a single one in english "Master" is "Maître" for a man, and "Maîtresse" for a woman.

So it should be :

@1212 = ~It shall be done, my master!~

@1212 = ~Ce sera fait, mon maître !~ ~Ce sera fait, maîtresse !~

And if i understand correctly what Gwendolyne told te me, for this spécial case, the .d file (the Wish spell genius) doe's not detect female version of the stringref. (We didn't add them in the last french update because of this)

Sorry if it's not very clear, i'm actually reporting a report of someone else.

Edited June 10, 2020 by Jazira

[jastey]

11 minutes ago, Jazira said:

@1212 = ~Ce sera fait, mon maître !~ ~Ce sera fait, maîtresse !~

The second string is for a female PC. But if the caster could be a female NPC (and the PC is male), the wrong gender text (the male one) will be shown for a female caster (and vice versa). I think that's the problem?

[Fouinto]

Are you REALLY sure ?

French is my mother tongue* and, for me, "maitre" or "maître" both fit for a male or for a female (I agree that "maitresse" or "maîtresse" is specifically for female but it doesn't mean that maitre/maître can't be used for female).

https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/maître/48734 says that it's a person, not only a male.

* this doesn't mean I am right

[DavidW]

I'm totally incompetent to advise on how the gender of 'maitre' works! But I don't want to end up editing the English-language text for this sort of reason. In principle I could detect the caster's gender (in fact for this version, the caster is always a hostile NPC mage) and use two lines that are identical in English, but I'd rather avoid it if I can. My suggestion would be: if the literal translation of 'master' is unavoidably gendered, find as near a term as you can that's gender-neutral. 

That said: reviewing the text, I'm not sure 'my master' is quite right, even as English - it doesn't quite match the tone of the PC-summoned wish djinni. I should probably look at changing it (this is ancient SCS dialog for the most part). I don't think it would do any great harm just to remove the 'my master' bit entirely, and I might actually do that to the English-language text next update. Then you'd just have

@1205 = ~Then I shall sweep them away!~
@1206 = ~Then speed you shall have!~
@1207 = ~Time is now your ally!~
@1208 = ~Then none shall harm you!~
@1210 = ~It shall be as if you were never harmed!~
@1212 = ~It shall be done!~

 

[Jazira]

6 hours ago, jastey said:

The second string is for a female PC. But if the caster could be a female NPC (and the PC is male), the wrong gender text (the male one) will be shown for a female caster (and vice versa). I think that's the problem?

Yes, exactly !

@Fouinto, yeah, you're right, but it's still sound a bit odd, no ? 

@DavidW, we tried to search for a neutral gendered word, but noone fit. I guess it can work fine this way, thanks. Sorry for bothering you for such detail.

[Fouinto]

9 hours ago, Jazira said:

Yes, exactly !

@Fouinto, yeah, you're right, but it's still sound a bit odd, no ? 

@DavidW, we tried to search for a neutral gendered word, but noone fit. I guess it can work fine this way, thanks. Sorry for bothering you for such detail.

True ! but like DavidW, I was looking for a workaround... His workaround is obviously the better