Languages

Languages

An addon that aims to bring in "speakable" ingame languages and dialects in a lightweight and accessible way.

This addon intentionally only obfuscates messages on the user side. As an example, if a player said "[Orcish] Hello friend", the addon skins it over and the user sees it as "[Orcish] Mokra zugzug" (or some other combination of languages). Non-addon users would not see this obfuscation, and instead see the original message, "[Orcish] Hello friend". This is done for a few reasons:

1. Obfuscating the messages forces users to install the addon. Not only does this prevent reporting harmful messages, but starting off an addon as an exclusive club will be very difficult to get moving and can create dangerous cliques.
2. Sending translations to players requires addon data. It'd still be miniscule and mostly insignificant, but every bit counts especially in an environment that's high population where user bandwidth may be throttled. This addon intentionally doesn't utilize any addon bandwidth at all. Any information used from TRP3 is solely from its API or via Saved Variables. This addon is made simple to intentionally work with other addons like CrossRP and with ingame items like Elixir of Tongues without sending addon data to translate.
3. This isn't a true translator. While it has a "dictionary", this simply runs words of a certain letter count through a parser. The sole purpose is to match a 3 letter word to another 3 letter word and make sure that the word stays the same every time it's used. This is what is known as the "hash" for this addon, and ensures something like "lol" will always translate to Orcish "kek" instead of randomly choosing "lok", "mok", or any other 3 letter example.
4. This addon doesn't translate true ingame languages. If somebody is speaking genuine Orcish, you as an Alliance player likely won't be able to see this translation. Likewise, this will not translate your own true Shalassian to non-Nightborne. Unfortunately this is just simply a limitation and runs into that area of sending translations via addon messages. If you want to avoid this issue, request that players instead use items like the Elixir of Tongues, join group with the player (grouped messages translate), OOC speak in Common (or other languages) while IC speaking in another language, or maybe ask Blizzard to lift these restrictions altogether. Likewise, it's outside of the addon capability to translate ingame languages you don't know, such as an NPC speaking Titan.

Some of the addon slash commands can be accessed via /languages, /language, or /lang. Sub-commands include prefix to toggle a langauge prefix on/off, open to display the options, and minimap to show/hide the minimap button.

Other slash commands include the ability to set your currently-spoken language directly in the slash command, such as /lang darnassian or /darnassian.

There are a few other features of this addon:

• Converting messages into glyph textures per character
• Total RP 3 Profile Compatibility
• Integration into speech bubbles (while not in instanced content)
• Optional automatic shapeshift language (currently only for Shadowform / Metamorphosis with Shath'yar / Demonic)
• Dialect converter (ie "dwarven accent")
• Dictionary (ie "Giant's Heart" = "Grommash")

Some things which are still planned:

• Potentially adjust for "true languages" (ie Horde characters speaking Orcish where the language tag isn't actually detected)
• Text color selection option (This is currently limited by buggy performance issues, so is currently not implemented)
• Finishing language glyphs for languages without them