Representing languages other than Common in PbP


Online Campaigns General Discussion

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

In play-by-post games, I tend to pick languages at random on Google Translate to represent various non-human languages, with a preference for languages that use something other than the Roman alphabet for languages from other planes.

Are there any particular conventions for certain Golarian languages being represented by specific real languages in PbP? What preferences do other players and GMs have for this? Is using a real language in this way offensive to native speakers of that language here on the boards? (Concern about this last question is why I switch to Bing Translate to use Klingon to represent Abyssal.)

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Looks like I put this thread in the wrong forum, so I have flagged it to be moved. I thought posting it under “Play-by-Post Discussion” made sense, without realizing that this heading is just the discussion threads of specific PbP campaigns. Not sure where it really belongs - maybe under the Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild forum, since most PbP games I’ve seen (or at least all of those I have been involved in) have been PFS games?

Customer Service Representative

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Moved to Online Campaigns General Discussion


I generally let the player whose PC first speaks a language in-thread pick what language they want to use for it in Google Translate. As such, there's no consistency between my games: Gnome is Irish in one and Swahili in another, for example.

The only hang-up I have is not to use either of the languages I studied in school because I remember enough to know when Google is making a hash of it but not enough to do the translation myself. :)

Scarab Sages

I have no real preference. So just like with Joana, langues differ per group. I do like using non-roman languages for things like celestial, abyssal or draconic.


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This discussion took place in another thread that I was following at the time, and someone posted a list of Google translate for languages, and that is what I ask my players to use:

Google Translate Languages:

Common: English
Abyssal = Urdu
Aklo = Telugu
Ancient Osiriani = Lao
Aquan = Tamil
Auran = Armenian
Azlanti = Greek
Celestial = Arabic
Draconic = Bengali
Druidic = Irish
Dwarven = Hebrew
Elven = Welsh
Erutaki = Finnish
Giant = Latvian
Gnoll = Indonesian
Gnome = Hungarian
Goblin = Maltese
Halfling = Estonian
Hallit = Russian
Hongali = Albanian
Ignan = Georgian
Infernal = Persian
Kelish = Catalan
Minkalan = Japanese
Necril = Khmer
Orc = Czech
Osiriani = Gujarati
Polygot = Swahili
Senzar = Macedonian
Shae = Belarusian
Shoanti = Croatian
Skald = Icelandic
Sylvan = Korean
Taldane/Chelish = English
Tengu = Filipino
Terran = Yiddish
Thassilonian = Kannada
Tien = Chinese (traditional)
Undercommon = Thai
Varisian = Lithuanian
Varki = Malay
Vudrani = Hindi


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<"For my part, I put alternate languages in bolded brackets like these when I want to signify that it's in another language but I don't want to impair readability.">

For other languages, well, I work with this for Aklo. XD

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