I've put a page about the translation of Quest in French here :

http://anamnese.online.fr/if/quest.html

You can find there the translation of the LDF file for French, the beginning of a synonym definition library (for typing commands in french), and a sample game (not finished to translate)

Btw about synonyms, how many verbs are used in the basic Quest ? It seems there are not many, and users have to define more themselves.

So far I've found :

manger = eat
prendre = take
regarder = look
parler à; parler = speak to
donner = give
utiliser = use
quitter = quit
sortir = exit

Hi Favardin

It's good to see someone already making use of the new language features of Quest to present the interface in French - more power to your elbow.

I do wonder if you can achieve a satisfactory level of performance 'language wise' with just synonymns for inbuilt command words though. Obviously you need to rework all the default messages in Quest to French equivalents too. More important, my vague recollections os studying the French language as a schoolboy (a long time ago and I never achieved any level of competence, so I might be entirely wrong here) is that the very structure of French is different enough to make just a literal word for word translation appear very stilted and clumsy - am I right on that?

I have a sneaking feeling that you'll need to replace almost all of Quest's inbuilt commands with new user commands that are tailored to give responses in anything approaching decent French.

My own 'typelib.qlb' alread replaces most of Quest's inbuilt commands anyway, so if you are willing to provide the 'conversion to decent french' expertise, I'm willing to attempt a French language version of that library, and add to it the remaining Quest inbuilt verbs.

Al

Yes, you're right we can't of course just translate word by word for getting French from English (look, it's what I do for writting in english, it's not really neat ) )

But so far it's still possible to have rather correct french using the LDF file. Here is a short example :

>take the river
you can't take it

here in french we only need to know the gender of the noun, and reverse it with the verb (it'd be " *You can't she take " if we translate word by word)

so I can write this :

badtake: Vous ne pouvez #quest.error.article# prendre.

and we get :

> prendre la rivière
Vous ne pouvez la prendre.

this example is quite simple, and in some other cases it can be less good. I'm looking for all the strange behaviours of Quest, and I'll try to write a report soon, I think it can apply to other language more complicated than english for this kind of syntax. But for example in Inform I can't find any problem with the translated library, so far all I got in my game written in it is good french, and it's quite flexible to adapt.
It could be a good idea to study how Inform handles the basic messages in different language (= how it can deal with syntax so it's possible to adapt it to other languages) :

http://www.inform-fiction.org/translations/

of course Inform has some disavantages in comparison to Quest, and the same goes for Quest in comparison to Inform, but I think Quest can be also flexible enough to get what we want. I'll post further how it works with a foreign language.

I'm interested in using your typelib for french. At the moment apart the translation of a simple game (without typelib), I'm creating my own game in english, using typelib, so we you'll release a kind of final version of it, I may translate it, if it's not a too heavy task.