[Suggestions] Per-mod language flags/language awareness

[eradicator]

Currently every mod is equal on the mod portal. It would be nice if mod authors could mark which languages a mod supports (or the portal auto-detected this by looking at the locale folder) and players could filter search results to prefer results in their language or to hide all other-language mods completely.

Also for bonus points as a mod author it would be great to be able to have a seperate description page for each language (or even just to show the localized mod description from locale.cfg). I currently include all 3 languages i know into my own mods (which takes a non-negligible amount of time), but with the main mod portal language being english there is no good way for me to communicate to the browsing player that my mods support anything other than english.

Also for platinum bonus points let mod authors visibly mark their spoken languages so players know that an author can understand questions/bug reports written in other languages if a player is not fluent in english. This could also be useful on the forums.

[eradicator]

Bumpy. Any official thoughts on this?

[Muppet9010]

I have just had a discussion with someone wanting to make a foreign language version of my mod and this was the only piece missing in why a mod shouldn't be duplicated for each language.

At the moment you basically need to speak English to be able to search for mods.

[Optera]

Well written mods, even if they only use English, should use localized strings for everything.
That way others can easily write language patches consisting only of info.json with dependency to the original mod and locale folder.

[Muppet9010]

Yes and that is what I have in my mod. However the mod portal page, FAQ ect is still either in one language or is duplicated in each language down its length.
So while near unlimited native speakers can contribute localle files to the mod, the portal page will tend to be or maybe 2 languages at most.

Ideally the other languages would be auto generated by the mod portal if not specifically specified. Say with Google translate.
Then someone searching in other languages would stand a better chance of finding what they want after a few variations to work around translations.

So if Inventory didn't translate directly into another language they may have to search for: storage, hold, carry, in their language.
Although in English you often have to search on multiple words to find the full range of mods.

[Optera]

Ah you mean mod portal language itself, gotcha.

Well I am a German native speaker, but am so used to using English I don't even bother with German most of the time.

[vjbone]

+ localised description ingame

[eradicator]

/me casts reincarnate

While the in-game "Manage" tab reads mod name and description from locale.cfg even for disabled mods, the "Install" tab and the website only show the English descriptions. And for added confusion the mod-portal description can be completely different from the description in info.json.