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Plugin suggestions for Dalamud
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Support for they/them pronouns #119

Open kalilistic opened 3 years ago

kalilistic commented 3 years ago

Description

Add support for in-game text to use they/them pronouns. Originally PrefPro request.

More info

See https://discord.com/channels/581875019861328007/685275026156683280/764027271228162058 for more information. There's discussion on the challenges and work-arounds for adding pronouns not currently in the game.

Original requester: Caur#5577

NadyaNayme commented 2 years ago

I believe this is handled by PrefPro?

reiichi001 commented 2 years ago

I believe this is handled by PrefPro?

It is not. Or rather, it's impossible for prefpro to do this as prefpro uses the game's built in text payload system to override gender switches and does not substitute pronouns.

See https://twitter.com/perchbird_/status/1313656354674966528 for a better explanation.

CeruleanArc commented 2 years ago

Someone mentioned that you'll need someone who has the ability to translate gendered to non-gendered or non-binary text. I'm a mental health professional who specializes in LGBT issues, and I strongly suggest that a non-binary person provide the localization changes.

Because this sounds like a monumental task, I'm kinda hoping that I get through this C# course fast so I can start trying out mods and invite one of my friends to help me with the localization changes. :o

But if you wanted to work on this, lemme know, and I'd be happy to introduce you to said friends who may still be interested in helping!

NotNite commented 2 years ago

I believe there are a few people who've taken up this task before, but here be warned this is one big project. Please don't get my tone wrong - I think this would be an amazing thing! Just, modifying a lot of dialogue can be painful, and will most likely take a team to review it.

You'd need to dump all of the lines in the game that check the gender of the player, check for grammatical issues & fix them, and repeat this every. single. patch. There are a lot of lines of dialogue in this game, and this isn't easy.

People have discussed a blind replacement of text with broken grammar (replacing all mentions of "she" to "they", for example) - this would be technically feasible, but out of scope for PrefPro. This would also miss some things like "lad/lass".

Don't let these issues drag you down, though - if you'd like to build either method anyways in the future, you can always stop by the developer channels in our Discord, and we'll do our best to help!

reiichi001 commented 2 years ago

Part of what makes this system tricky is that pretty much all gendered language in FFXIV referring to the player is processed through text payloads with a very basic conditional/templating system like "as you know, is a <if player.sex=male then 'man' else 'woman'>."

So it doesn't really provide a means to override those sorts of checks without passing it through something else that would adjust the final text payload which is entirely possible, but would involve having to check/sanitize every line, either at processing time with the chance of something being missed or something not substituting in natural language, or done as a preprocessed manner, akin to releasing an unofficial translation of the game into another language.

In most cases, it'd probably be easier to treat this less as a plugin as more like a mod, where the data could be exported into a human-friendly format, have its adjustments made, and then imported through textools or penumba, with all the gendered language adjusted.

We know players can -technically- get away with injecting language files from the Chinese and Korean clients, so it stands that if someone was familiar with the same data sheets in the client that hold all of this text, then we could possibly create the tooling needed to take outside text and inject it back in. From there, you'd want to set up a filter of sorts to only grabbed the gendered lines and put that up somewhere people could then work on it. (Crowdin normally sounds like a good place for this, but I'm not sure how they'd handle modification of copyrighted material we don't own. ...although even a detailed excel sheet with the source line and replacement could honestly work.)

If the tooling exists to be able to inject text back, this research could also be used to help translate the game into languages that SE doesn't support, with some form of fallback language for untranslated portions.