Friday Facts #436 - Lost in Translation

[Yuki_Nagato]

Two suggestions:

Secondary language search, like search in English item names when using other display language. It is helpful when 1. someone uses other language in game, and I want to know what item he's referring to; 2. I'm used to search in English but I'm trying to learn to use another language (probably to comunicate with people in other language).

Chinese pinyin search, pinyin is the phonetic alphabet for Chinese characters, which most Chinese users use in IME.
For example, "chest" in Chinese is "箱"(pinyin: xiang), wooden chest is "木箱"(piyin: muxiang). To search "箱" in Chinese we need 1. open IME; 2. type "xiang" 3. choose "箱" in the editor from about 1000 candidate characters. 4 close IME (because most IME have compatibility issues like capturing a-z input, making in-game keybinds like movement not responding, or straight up crashes the game).
If we can search chests by directly type and search "xiang", it will save time from finding the specific Chinese character form hundreds or thousands of candidates, and don't need to open an IME, and no extra learning needed.
Surprisingly this is not hard to implement because Chinese character have a clear pinyin dictionary (or look-up table, in a more programming perspective) and we actually have many working examples like this one in Minecraft modding: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc ... characters (There are even multiple mods providing this feature in mc.)
It comes down to three steps 1. convert Chinese character to pinyin by using pinyin table; 2. type plain a-z characters and search like English 3. find matching pinyin strings. These steps are essentially searching in secondary language, just an internal "pinyin language".