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Welcome to the wiki for this toki pona translation project! Here's where information goes which is useful to the translation project but not to the user. Check out the Style Guide and here's an introduction to the project:
So far the majority of the 1.16.5 main lang file is translated (all except command feedback and overly technical language), as well as the end poem. Both need feedback; after some refinement the process of converting the lang files to sitelen sitelen hieroglyphics can start. The realms and splash files will also need to be translated, though probably not the credits file.
Toki Pona is a relatively popular conlang ('constructed language') made by the linguist Sonja Lang. It is extremely minimalist, having a very simple grammar and a lexicon of only 123 words plus a handful of unofficial ones. This makes it very easy to learn but a puzzle to use since frozen compounds are highly discouraged.
Toki Pona is in a way the perfect sort of language for many games, and especially for Minecraft. Just as games tend to be simplified, easy-to-learn snapshots of the complicated mess that is real life, Toki Pona is a simplified, easy-to-learn version of the complicated mess that is natural language. In Minecraft you have to get creative with limited shapes and textures, to approximate all sorts of irl objects—e.g. a pressure plate and a painting for a laptop. The same thing goes for Toki Pona—there is no word for ’laptop’ but it can be approximated with ilo sona ‘knowledge tool’. Other parallels include:
- Many alternatives in approximating an object: who can be the most ingenious?
- Minimization of functionless words/items
- Minimization of overly similar words/blocks
- Minimization of overly detailed blocks/overly specific words
Hello, I'm jan Masewin, also known as Bluebee. I started this translation as a hobby project after finding no-one had completed a usable translation before. Why am I on GitHub instead of Phrase or Crowdin? It might not exactly be translation management software but GitHub does have excellent project management, provides reliable file-sharing and happens to be free. Translations which come included in Minecraft are hosted in the game's public Crowdin project but it isn't easy to add a new language and we might be waiting on the project managers for a long time, especially for such a niche translation. But hey, the game has Klingon and Shakespearean English after all.