Esperanto as a possible listed language on Steam?

[Phagocytosis]

Hey! Please excuse this rather unusual request.

I would like Esperanto to be a possible language listed for games on Steam. Currently, even if a game does have an Esperanto translation, the creator(s) cannot indicate this on Steam because Esperanto is not listed as an option. I understand that it's not a common language for video game translations, but it does occur now and then. I myself did a complete translation for Slay the Spire, and I'd get some pleasure out of seeing it appear in the list for that game. I would like to be able to find other games by this language (or at least filter results of searches) the way you can for other languages such as French or Russian.

More generally, I think it would be good if all languages (within reason, perhaps? Something like any language with an ISO code?) could be listed... but I'm here just requesting my particular pet language.

Thanks!

[Phagocytosis]

Thank you, cSg|mc-Hotsauce, for the link. I received that link in response to my request to Steam as well, some time ago, so you are indeed right that there are currently no efforts to add any more languages. Perhaps some day in the future.

cinedine, yes, it can be tricky sometimes, but there are efforts to bring Esperanto up to date with this stuff. Websites like Komputeko have a lot of technical, computer-related terminology, and there have been discussions about gaming nomenclature in particular here and there.

Cathulhu and cSg|mc-Hotsauce, indeed Slay the Spire is an example—I translated it in full and it is now a language you can play that game in. The same is true for Mini Metro, although I think that translation (which I had no part in) has a number of mistakes. I don't know of any others, which is exactly why I would have liked Esperanto as a language supported by Steam, so that I could find them that way.

Washell, I doubt very much that that is the case, although it is a bit hard to keep up with recent developments. Certainly Klingon and Quenya are not spoken more than Esperanto, and I have my doubts about High Valyrian as well.

[wuddih]

Whatsifsowhatsit님이 먼저 게시:

Certainly Klingon and Quenya are not spoken more than Esperanto, and I have my doubts about High Valyrian as well.

all have one thing in common ...
you have to either surround yourself with people that speak it or you have to meet up for the purpose to speak it.

none of these languages have any serious meaning on the planet. no one ever suggested to hold an non-esperanto-related international meeting in esperanto.

if number of speakers comes to topic, esperato is always just estimated numbers, the same goes for the other mentioned languages. everything is just assumptions. no clear number because the language has no region/country to back it up.

wikipedia states "estimated 1000 to several thousand (2016)" native speakers, which is a self-proclaimed information from 2 biased sources, but that is the only number that is relevant.

these is the possible number of possible users that possibly cannot use Steam because of a possible language barrier ... possibly.
i doubt that this number is any correct and i doubt that all native speakers have not learned a second language and i doubt that most of them are even a possible target audience for Steam.

dont get me wrong here, i dont wanna exclude any language from Steam.

on Steam the translations for Steam and its features are done by us, the users.
if a language gathers a group of people that can do and maintain the language for years to come, i see no reason not to add it.

i just dont wanna get any hopes up, hope is the killer of progress.

most languages on Steam that were not added but in planning failed because the people that wanted to do it, didn't do anything to show that long-lasting will would be there .. and that even failed for some of the languages that are available on Steam.

[Phagocytosis]

You are certainly right about what you say in your first paragraph, but I wouldn't say they don't have a serious meaning on the planet. I suppose it's all relative and you could say their meaning is less serious than that of most natural languages, which might well be true, but in absolute terms I don't think I would agree with your statement, there.

I think most of the native speakers have other languages, as well, in fact many probably come from a background of people interested in languages and so might speak a good number of them—Fürst von Motz up above mentioned the possibility of people who speak only Esperanto natively, but I haven't heard of such cases and certainly think they would be quite rare. But being the only language one could use in my opinion is not the only reason adding a language to Steam would be good. Even some of those who have a different native language already on Steam might enjoy using Esperanto because they are trying to learn it, for example, which is one piece of feedback I already received from someone using my Slay the Spire translation. Or they might just use the language and enjoy seeing it used.

I know you weren't arguing against allowing Esperanto on Steam, as such; I'm just replying to your mention of users who cannot possibly use Steam if not for Esperanto, which seemed implicitly to suggest only for those Esperanto on Steam might be worthwhile. (If I misinterpreted, there, my apologies.)

However, I would say you are right that there seems to be little hope for Esperanto on Steam, in particular, certainly not in the short term.

That said, most of what I want from the language being on Steam is not to have a full-fledged translation of the platform, but just to have it be available to select for games as a language the game supports, so that a user (such as myself) can click on it and find other games that include that language. It seems that in order to do that, Steam requires the entire platform to be translated (or at least in the process of being translated) into the language, which is unfortunate and a little strange, but so be it.

Incidentally, thank you for being so civil and polite in this discussion... I have certainly seen otherwise, when Esperanto is mentioned.

[Fürst von Motz]

Whatsifsowhatsit님이 먼저 게시:

You are certainly right about what you say in your first paragraph, but I wouldn't say they don't have a serious meaning on the planet. I suppose it's all relative and you could say their meaning is less serious than that of most natural languages, which might well be true, but in absolute terms I don't think I would agree with your statement, there.

I think most of the native speakers have other languages, as well, in fact many probably come from a background of people interested in languages and so might speak a good number of them—Fürst von Motz up above mentioned the possibility of people who speak only Esperanto natively, but I haven't heard of such cases and certainly think they would be quite rare. But being the only language one could use in my opinion is not the only reason adding a language to Steam would be good. Even some of those who have a different native language already on Steam might enjoy using Esperanto because they are trying to learn it, for example, which is one piece of feedback I already received from someone using my Slay the Spire translation. Or they might just use the language and enjoy seeing it used.

I know you weren't arguing against allowing Esperanto on Steam, as such; I'm just replying to your mention of users who cannot possibly use Steam if not for Esperanto, which seemed implicitly to suggest only for those Esperanto on Steam might be worthwhile. (If I misinterpreted, there, my apologies.)

However, I would say you are right that there seems to be little hope for Esperanto on Steam, in particular, certainly not in the short term.

That said, most of what I want from the language being on Steam is not to have a full-fledged translation of the platform, but just to have it be available to select for games as a language the game supports, so that a user (such as myself) can click on it and find other games that include that language. It seems that in order to do that, Steam requires the entire platform to be translated (or at least in the process of being translated) into the language, which is unfortunate and a little strange, but so be it.

Incidentally, thank you for being so civil and polite in this discussion... I have certainly seen otherwise, when Esperanto is mentioned.

Just have to add this bit:
Of course it's rare, that they only speak Esperanto (though most of them now learned German, but some are still on Esperanto only). I am talking about a small village. And only some people do think that it's a good idea to only teach their children Esperanto. Those are only a few of many. Max. 0,000001%.



And Also:

wuddih님이 먼저 게시:

...
" wikipedia states "estimated 1000 to several thousand (2016)" native speakers, which is a self-proclaimed information from 2 biased sources, but that is the only number that is relevant. "
...

"The Chinese government has used Esperanto since 2001 for daily news on china.org.cn. China also uses Esperanto in China Radio International and for the internet magazine El Popola Ĉinio."

"Esperanto is the working language of several non-profit international organizations such as the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda" ...

"Esperanto is also the first language of teaching and administration of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino."

Further on:

" Zamenhof's goal to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not", as he wrote in 1887, has been achieved, as the language is currently spoken by people living in more than 100 countries. "


About the question if Esperanto is the same like all other invented and artificial languages:

The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has found that Esperanto fulfills all the requirements of a living language.


And about your numbers:

"Culbert concluded that between one and two million people speak Esperanto at Foreign Service Level 3, "professionally proficient" (able to communicate moderately complex ideas without hesitation, and to follow speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.)."

"Finnish linguist Jouko Lindstedt, an expert on native-born Esperanto speakers, presented the following scheme to show the overall proportions of language capabilities within the Esperanto community:
1,000 have Esperanto as their native language.
10,000 speak it fluently.
100,000 can use it actively.
One million understand a large amount passively.
Ten million have studied it to some extent at some time."



Sources: Mostly Wikipedia (and websites from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, f.e.)

[Phagocytosis]

Yes, although I think Lindstedt's numbers are probably outdated, now, what with the huge surge coming from Duolingo and other modern sources for learning the language. This surge added me to the number of fluent speakers, and I'm sure there are many others alongside me.

In the end it's really more of a question how many people would like to see Esperanto on Steam, either as a language in which the platform itself is translated, or just as a language used in some games, and perhaps listed as such. How many speakers the language has is less relevant, and how many of those are native speakers without other languages to fall back on even less so... in my opinion, anyway.

But I do appreciate you sharing some of those numbers.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Whatsifsowhatsit님이 먼저 게시:

In the end it's really more of a question how many people would like to see Esperanto on Steam, either as a language in which the platform itself is translated, or just as a language used in some games, and perhaps listed as such. How many speakers the language has is less relevant, and how many of those are native speakers without other languages to fall back on even less so... in my opinion, anyway.

So how do you think the economics of that would work, exactly?

Those two things are exactly the most relevant things. A) A tiny minority of people speak it B) it isnt a primary language (unless your parents are degenerates)

Why would a company bother investing in THAT, exactly?

Answer: They wouldnt. Only advocates come up with idea like this and choose to make the actual most important points "irrelevant".

This is what you do: you go around and translate games for free, for your pet cause. Sure, you do you.

As for Steam, no Valve shouldnt waste a single second of labor or KB of data for this ridiculousness.

..and youll have an even harder time trying to get a game dev to care, about a barely used tertiary language.

[Fürst von Motz]

Whatsifsowhatsit님이 먼저 게시:

Yes, although I think Lindstedt's numbers are probably outdated, now, what with the huge surge coming from Duolingo and other modern sources for learning the language. This surge added me to the number of fluent speakers, and I'm sure there are many others alongside me.

In the end it's really more of a question how many people would like to see Esperanto on Steam, either as a language in which the platform itself is translated, or just as a language used in some games, and perhaps listed as such. How many speakers the language has is less relevant, and how many of those are native speakers without other languages to fall back on even less so... in my opinion, anyway.

But I do appreciate you sharing some of those numbers.

Exactly, and no problem. Ne dankinde.

Therefore: Workers... eh... Esperantujoj of the world, unite!

[Phagocytosis]

AmsterdamHeavy, the reason I said the speakers and native speakers are less relevant is because in the end what matters is how many people would use it in the language. If there is a language with five million speakers of whom one million would use Steam in that language, that language in my opinion is as deserving of a Steam translation as a language with fifty million speakers of whom one million would use Steam in that language. The reason I think you would say that the number of speakers and the number of native speakers are relevant is exactly because you assume, presumably, that this would be directly proportional to the number of people to use the platform in that language. That is probably true, or at least there will be some correlation, but my point was only that ultimately the number of users is what matters, not the number of speakers.

And again, the only thing I really wanted was to have Esperanto in the list of languages that a game can support. That would take next to no Steam dev hours. (I know you said it should be not a single second, but if it really were a matter of only a few minutes, I think that would be well worth it.) Actually translating the platform, sure, that would require a lot of effort... but having Esperanto in such a list really wouldn't.

I actually did get a game dev to care, incidentally, as, like I mentioned above, I translated Slay the Spire into Esperanto for Mega Crit Games. And "barely used" is debatable... depending on how you count, the number of speakers (admittedly not all of them fluent, but probably most of them good enough to play a game in Esperanto or perhaps use it to help learn the language) is estimated between 2 and 10 million, the range in which we also find languages such as Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Belarusian, and Serbian.

But like I also said already, I don't expect much in this regard. Certainly no full-scale platform translation. I do wish that wouldn't be required just for a game to list it as a language if it indeed does have the game translated into it. Seems strange to me that the developers can't mention that just because Valve didn't mention it in whatever string array (or whatever structure it is) that lists their languages.

Another by the way: I wouldn't really say it's a pet cause so much as just a hobby, something I do for fun. I'm not really concerned about Esperanto as a "cause", just as a fun language to use like any other.

[zuzu]

Minecraft has official support for Esperanto, since I didn't see it mentioned here yet. Not a Steam game, of course, but it's worth noting.

[Phagocytosis]

Oh, right you are. I played it in an Esperanto server for a while, with the game also set to Esperanto. Good times.

[(ArchAngel) Valkyrie]

Zeaga님이 먼저 게시:

Minecraft has official support for Esperanto, since I didn't see it mentioned here yet. Not a Steam game, of course, but it's worth noting.

Yeah, Minecraft was pretty quick to support Esperanto, which tells you how much they appreciate their fans. I don't think Steam really cares as much about the community and they won't unless we raise a stink about it.

[Phagocytosis]

Thank you, Scarlet WarDog, for breathing new life into this discussion. I'm not sure if it's related, but just recently at least two new Steam games have received Esperanto translations (Helltaker and Tooth and Tail, the latter of which I translated), and another has a beta translation currently available outside of Steam (Spelunky), still being improved upon.

I still feel that it is silly that it cannot just be listed. It would allow someone with an interest, such as myself, to click on the language and instantly find all other languages on Steam that offer the language. It doesn't need to have a full platform translation behind it; they could just add a ton of minor languages very cheaply.

Incidentally, I'd like to point out the Steam group and curator, Ludoj en Esperanto, which attempts to list games that have Esperanto translations or otherwise have Esperanto in them somehow, exactly because Steam itself does not do so. If anyone knows of any other games that could go in that list, please mention it in that group.