Games supporting multiple languages

I recall a time when most games I played where purely in English.  Times have changed though, and Ive noticed more and more games are being built with at least five major languages that are selectable.  Many of these are done "on the fly" which is extremely cool.

Over the last 3 years Ive taken up a hobby of learning the German language.  I want to teach my daughter and son a second language early in life so that they grow up respecting the fact that there are many cultures that DO NOT speak English (and are very much populated) and primarily because it expands their ability to learn linguistics without even knowing its occuring.

When I look back I really wish my  parents house was a bi-lingual establishment because I think its cool to be able to converse in a method NOT native English.  So hopefully my kids learn to respect that as well.

Since I do not "get out much" I cannot immerse myself in the German language up in New Hampshire (besides my scheduled classes once a week) so Ive found changing my web-browser to another language forces some immersion as does german PODCasts which I download on my Nano.  However games are now giving me the opportunity to immerse myself as well.  GuildWars does a great job at this and nothing increases the game difficulty more then being given a mission to do (in german) and having to figure out what the hell your supposed to do.

The "on the fly" language changing means that when Im totally confused I can just swap back to English to figure it out.

The Xbox 360 also supports multiple languages for, at least, the Console interface.  Or http://www.xbox.com/de-DE/ translates all my achievements and gaming information into German.  Nice.

So as the gaming world goes "online" it finds itself having to speak many languages... some of which are not even Latin based languages.  Arena Net (makers of Guildwars) has a parent company "NCSoft" is a Korean based company and nobody knows languages better then an area of the world that has dozens of non-Latin based linguistics.

You may think this is easy, but believe me it is far from it.  A language that uses Latin-1 characters sets can get away with A thru Z and a few special characters (ö, ü, ß, and others).  However when you jump into Japanese or Chinese youre going to find that its highly character "glyph" based and things just dont work out the same.

For instance, if a developer designed a dialog box to fit the words "Maximum speed limit" they know that the box must fit 19 or less characters and can break for a new line on spaces... but the German term for the same thing could be: "Höchstgeschwindigkeit" which does not lend itself well to "line breaks" since its one BIG word.  And the chinese glyphs might not even come close to fitting.  So much care has to be worked into making software "language transparent" for gaming.  If you play a game or use a system that supports many dynamic languages you should take a few seconds to respect the developers effort to globalize their product and work above and beyond the realm of English in order to do so..

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