[PC] Please support multilanguage at least for chat and in-box messages

[ArinCherryBlossom]

I have a foreign friend who can not use my language.
Both of us live in non-english culture country and both have client in own language.
The problem is that we can not see and write opponent's language in chat or in-box message.
So, I tested the client.

* Tested on these clients
Language 1 (mine)
Language 2 (friend's)
English

1. English client
Language 1 - Can not be seen, Can not write
Language 2 - Can not be seen, Can not write
English - Can be seen, Can write

2. Language 1 client
Language 1 - Can be seen, Can write
Language 2 - Can not be seen, Can not write
English - Can be seen, Can write

3. Language 2 client
Language 1 - Can not be seen, Can not write
Language 2 - Can be seen, Can write
English - Can be seen, Can write

It means that each language client can only see and write their own language.
We added each other as friends which means at least we can connect with each other.
If Warframe is going to support one-sever for whole world, I think it is basic to support multiple languages.

Thanks

Edited November 2, 2017 by ArinCherryBlossom

[[DE]Grzegorz]

Region, Trade and Recruiting are locked to certain languages (e.g. in central Europe or the US, these chats are primarily English, though people are not exactly prevented from using other languages, it's generally frowned upon to flood the chat with VAN MAGYAR or TURKCE however).

Squad chats or private messages do not have such limitation.

 

Certain limitations are by design, regions can be changed in-game (though are region, not language specific), clan, squad and private chat are unregulated, if you cannot talk to your friend while in a squad or privately, then we have an issue you should inform the technical support about.

 

However, on a tangent, the item linking is flawed and suffers from the same issue objectives have been suffering from repeatedly, it passes raw text instead of data what should be displayed, in-game it resulted in objectives being displayed in Russian if the host was Russian, same applies to linking where e.g. some frenchman can link [Sybaris Prime Barrel] and have it displayed as [Sybaris Prime - Cannone] and lead to nowhere.

Edited November 2, 2017 by JuicyButthurt

[ArinCherryBlossom]

3 hours ago, JuicyButthurt said:

Squad chats or private messages do not have such limitation.

Nope. Private message also has limitation.

The languages I said is Japanese, Korean, Chinese such things. I said I'm in non-english culture on the thread

[[DE]Grzegorz]

45 minutes ago, ArinCherryBlossom said:

Nope. Private message also has limitation.

The languages I said is Japanese, Korean, Chinese such things. I said I'm in non-english culture on the thread

I am fairly certain this is not the case but I'd like to confirm or deny it for sure, are you in game right now?

 

After quick chat with the OP we've established what the problem actually is.

Lack of fonts. English variant of the game does not support all of these fancy bushes people of Asia use to convey their ideas, instead it's replaced with asterisks (*).

Edited November 2, 2017 by JuicyButthurt

[ArinCherryBlossom]

2 hours ago, JuicyButthurt said:

After quick chat with the OP we've established what the problem actually is.

Lack of fonts. English variant of the game does not support all of these fancy bushes people of Asia use to convey their ideas, instead it's replaced with asterisks (*).

I think it is not lack of fonts.

Because if you change language setting from the launcher, you can see that specific language you set in the game.

 

For example, as I said from the example from above, let's say I want to see Korean and Japanese at the same time.

1) If you start game with Korean setting, you can see and write Korean and English, but not Japanese (+other non-english characters)

2) If you start game with Japanese setting, you can see and write Japanese and English, but not Korean (+other non-english characters)

 

It means... (actually I assumes)

Possibility 1. Every font is already included in client but client uses specific language font for each language settings

Possibility 2. It just don't display other languages even client can show them.

Edited November 2, 2017 by ArinCherryBlossom

[spot227]

I registered my account on Mar 27th, 2013, but only started playing last month.

One glaring issue besides regretting not joining as a founder is that you decided that censoring all non-latin characters in the English version of the game is a one-size-fits-all solution and/or you just couldn't justify the added software development cost.

My first language is Mandarin, but I prefer the English version because this is an English-produced game and it feels more natural to use your native language. Frankly, when the plague star event first came out, Chinese version users were asking in region chat what that event was about, which, as you have guessed, means that the translation also lags behind. Also, I find it hard to understand which in-game item is which if I switch to Chinese.

I titled this thread as "allow users..." instead of "do not filter..." because I'm aware of aspects like this: 

But why can't it be an option like profanity filter that leaves this choice to us users?

My use case frequently involves me connecting to Chinese users, in which, they can read English fine using the Chinese language version (not the separate Warframe China and I have never bothered with games run by Chinese companies) while I just see asterisks from them. 

Every now and then, people suggest something similar, but I'm not sure if you even care (There are other threads, but I couldn't find them again for now):

If I were to "exaggerate" this issue, it would be a case of discrimination against bilingual and multilingual users.

I get the vibe that you want Warframe to be Socialframe to generate more revenue, but what I described here does exactly the opposite.

From a software engineering perspective, I just proposed a requirement as a "client". What the product manager do with it is out of my hands.

----Edit----

A personal experience relevant to this issue:

After I reached MR 2 to use chat, I "met" another Chinese player in public matchmaking who, I can tell, is Chinese judging by his username. After he (assumed gender) told me in English that he doesn't understand much English, I replied I'm Chinese too. Then the embarrassing thing happened: I didn't know non-latin characters were censored after seeing asterisks so I thought he's swearing, which prompted me to confirm with him in English to no avail. Of course, I couldn't tell him what's happening at the time and I just left.

This is one of the unpleasant experiences I've had in Warframe that may be more damaging to the other player I mentioned above. I have just enough experience online to let all the bad ones go, but I couldn't say the same for other people, especially younger people. My point is this trivial negativity may have driven people away.

Edited November 30, 2017 by spot227
Adding a personal experience

[peterc3]

21 minutes ago, spot227 said:

If I were to "exaggerate" this issue, it would be a case of discrimination against bilingual and multilingual users.

What exactly is your point with this?

Unicode is, besides the utility of other languages' odd sized characters, the enabler of hilarious memes in text form. Why S#&$post in normal text when you can make wacky faces as well? Make your case without attempts at emotional manipulation.

[spot227]

1 minute ago, peterc3 said:

What exactly is your point with this?

Unicode is, besides the utility of other languages' odd sized characters, the enabler of hilarious memes in text form. Why S#&$post in normal text when you can make wacky faces as well? Make your case without attempts at emotional manipulation.

Your response is exactly what I'm afraid of because people will say and take things differently out of different motives. That's where misunderstanding comes from. I'm responding to you only because I fear that you'll drag this thread down the road.

[Ada_Wong_SG]

I guess currently it is very hard to communicate in missions, 
All I see is "********" in the chat and there is no way to confirm if a language is actually written in Chinese, or other asian languages.
Some of the players have "KR" tag with them and some would have "JP" on their name.

There isnt much CN players around, more HK and TW actually,
most of the time their chat just went into "*****" and there is no way to tell if they are asking to 
camp, attack, defend or evacuate, which often we guessed it wrongly.

if you are having no idea what I am talking about, 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

 

I do know that it allows funny emotions such as

°△°　°皿°　のへの　

but I guess that is another topic to address.

[spot227]

28 minutes ago, Ada_Wong_SG said:

There isnt much CN players around, more HK and TW actually,

|･ω･｀) That depends on where you are. CN's international connectivity is notorious. I setup a VPN myself that exits in HK through a premium carrier link with vacant capacity to reduce jitter and packet loss. Warframe's design is quite commendable in this regard as I can play in N/A region as long as my connection is stable with minimum jitter and packet loss regardless of 200 to 300 ms ping.

[TiggerRoars]

This is pretty frustrating to me as well,most asians dont speak english as their first language. My random squadmates that i come across are sometimes non-english speakers and trust me no matter how much i explain that i cannot see what hey type they would still reply me in their own language. I can read chinese though its not my strongest suit, i can read it.

 

As you can see in this picture, that whole 35 mins frustrated me because i had NO idea what was going on until one of the squadmates decided to type in english. I understand that if they want to separate markets but this is too much isnt it? I can read chinese but because im more comfortable with english i will have no clue on what my chinese speaking friends are saying.

 

DE needs to add actual multi-language in the game because if im going to be matched up against people that speak one language which isnt english i might as well see what they are typing. And Yes you can pick the language of your warframe, I prefer English because i read faster in english, plus i speak around 7 languages and i can read them and all of them are in the selection of language DE offers in their launcher. 

**EDIT** 
So either they need to make sure that NO player with a different language is matched with you OR just make it a thing.

Edited December 12, 2017 by TiggerRoars

[ViolettaFoxx]

This seems to be with the chat functions not supporting the fonts for different languages. Looks like DE wasn't proactive in supporting the fonts even when swapping servers. Or are they pulling out of the local client's machine for fonts?

[Ada_Wong_SG]

The chat function does not support other languages currently, that is if you play English client.
Switching to Chinese or Japanese seems to enable the decoding thus support all chinese characters,kanji, hiragana and katakana

Though that would mean all your mod interface, arsernal... and everything else will be hard-translated and most 
of the translation is pretty off as I can read both Chinese and English language, some translation on the Chinese client is hilarious.

Japanese translation is slightly better than Chinese, consider there is Katakana for pronunciation translation and Kanji/ hiragana 
being used for meaning translation.

With inconsistent terms of translation ranging from Soma being translated as it's meaning, 
and Sybaris being hard translate into it's pronunciation using Chinese characters as "consonants"

Edited December 13, 2017 by Ada_Wong_SG

[poe-]

+1

 

As a Japanese player who plays English client most of the time (because I can hardly find anyone to play with in the Recruiting tab if I set the language to Japanese), I have to say that the English client won't show any non-Latin characters is *extremely* annoying. Say, I receive a private message from a friend who speaks Japanese, and then all I can do is ridiculously ask them "please type what you said right now two minutes later," and restart the client.

 

I know there are always issues with multilingualization, such as the Han unification problem (assuming Warframe uses Unicode). But "some characters may be rendered incorrectly" is far much better than the current situation.

[MqToasty]

I hate to dredge up an old thread, but it's 2021 already and this is still an issue.  I just started playing multiplayer, and almost immediately ran into this exact problem.  While setting the client to Traditional Chinese allowed the chat messages to display correctly, I've already played more than 1000 hours in English and would really rather not have to relearn all of the obscure terms and item names again.

Seriously folks, it's 2021 already.  I18n should not be this hard.  I suspect merely setting the chat font to a Unicode one with East Asian language glyphs will do the trick (everything else is automatic if your text encoding is utf-8 or something similar), can you at least give it a try?

[ChickenBar]

Agree to everyone here. It's 2021 where pretty much everyone is bilingual at some level, please don't make the game tell people what language they don't know.

None of the other online games I've played have this issue. Warframe is by no means behind in tech, 14 different languages/variants are already supported in the game, just flip the flippin switch!

[TuXus3r]

PLEEEEASE. I'm a native spanish speaker, i DESPISE spanish names and stuff the like, However i'd still love to be able to have my game in english while being able to play with people of my region. I've set my game to english and my region to north america, and i FINALLY saw someone type in chat. I've NEVER seen anyone type in the english channels in south america in my good 400h of warframe. Please. I just want to have my english names. while playing at low ping. It's not bad by any means to play with 150, however 70 is way more desirable. Pretty please, DE. 

[CarrotSalad]

I am always shocked when i join a party and see "??????" appearing in the chat box.

It's like wow they still dont let us communicate via text chat with conflicting language clients.

[Xyand]

Posted in 2017, and still active in 2022.

I know it's minor thing, but this is the QoL as players truly needed to enjoy the game as Multiplayer game as WF was meant to be. 

Until then, SOLO session here I come~

[Sieggy93]

Bumps for this