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addedGame localization is a very important, but not the most apparent step in game development. No matter how small your game is, a good translation can increase the number of potential buyers. On the other hand, a not so good translation can scare them off. Our games - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Marble Age, Predynastic Egypt and soon to be released Egypt: Old Kingdom are translated into 13 languages in general. We'll be glad to share our experience and talk about a few unexpected problems we had to deal with during localization. The original language of our games is Russian, so the first step was to translate it into English. When our team still had only one member and when the first game, Stone Age, was created, there was no choice but to pay for translation. It wasn't the best choice not only because of money but also because translators-outsiders probably would not be aware of what game they are translating. It makes mistranslation possible. Thus, we decided to translate the next game, Marble Age, ourselves. The translation we made knew no proofreading, no editor's eye... well, you can guess how "great" this translation was. We got criticized for it a lot. Nevertheless, the goal was achieved - both games got translated into English. Later both translations were revised and edited by natives. Now to get the game translated into English is only half a battle. It helps to attract more players among English-speakers, this includes people who speak other languages as well. Thanks to the fact that we put a lot of efforts in making our texts interesting and informative, we soon got many offers of help from people who wanted to translate our games to their languages! Needless to say, we were only happy to accept. The first volunteer came from Spain, and Marble Age got its Spanish version. Since then our friend from Spain became one of our most supportive volunteers and helped to translate other games as well. Later another volunteer from Turkey appeared. Then another one from Germany. They all had to spend several weeks, helping us to localize our games. But as we all started to work together, we found out that our games are not designed to accommodate translations. These are basic problems we encountered: 1. Correct display of translated texts. Other languages can contain diacritics - special symbols which can be all around the letter, for example sometimes you can see the word "naïve" with two dots instead of one, or like in many French or Spanish words, like "Rêver" or "niño". The most extreme case of this problem, though, is when the new language is not Latin alphabet based, for example, Chinese or Hindi. 2. The screens of our games were designed to fit Russian language sentences. Sometimes when the text got translated into other languages, the length of a sentence changed, and it didn't fit into the screen anymore. Sometimes the translated sentence was too short, it also didn't look pretty. This is how we shortened English words: German also didn't look very well: 3. The most difficult problem was about words order. Every language has different sentence structure. For us, it was important because we like to replace some words with symbols for people, food, resources, etc. But in order to construct the correct sentence, all symbols must appear in the right places. During translation, words order was often messed up and we had troubles placing symbols in the right places.
Predynastic Egypt changes
addedGame localization is a very important, but not the most apparent step in game development. No matter how small your game is, a good translation can increase the number of potential buyers. On the other hand, a not so good translation can scare them off. Our games - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Marble Age, Predynastic Egypt and soon to be released Egypt: Old Kingdom are translated into 13 languages in general. We'll be glad to share our experience and talk about a few unexpected problems we had to deal with during localization. The original language of our games is Russian, so the first step was to translate it into English. When our team still had only one member and when the first game, Stone Age, was created, there was no choice but to pay for translation. It wasn't the best choice not only because of money but also because translators-outsiders probably would not be aware of what game they are translating. It makes mistranslation possible. Thus, we decided to translate the next game, Marble Age, ourselves. The translation we made knew no proofreading, no editor's eye... well, you can guess how "great" this translation was. We got criticized for it a lot. Nevertheless, the goal was achieved - both games got translated into English. Later both translations were revised and edited by natives. Now to get the game translated into English is only half a battle. It helps to attract more players among English-speakers, this includes people who speak other languages as well. Thanks to the fact that we put a lot of efforts in making our texts interesting and informative, we soon got many offers of help from people who wanted to translate our games to their languages! Needless to say, we were only happy to accept. The first volunteer came from Spain, and Marble Age got its Spanish version. Since then our friend from Spain became one of our most supportive volunteers and helped to translate other games as well. Later another volunteer from Turkey appeared. Then another one from Germany. They all had to spend several weeks, helping us to localize our games. But as we all started to work together, we found out that our games are not designed to accommodate translations. These are basic problems we encountered: 1. Correct display of translated texts. Other languages can contain diacritics - special symbols which can be all around the letter, for example sometimes you can see the word "naïve" with two dots instead of one, or like in many French or Spanish words, like "Rêver" or "niño". The most extreme case of this problem, though, is when the new language is not Latin alphabet based, for example, Chinese or Hindi. 2. The screens of our games were designed to fit Russian language sentences. Sometimes when the text got translated into other languages, the length of a sentence changed, and it didn't fit into the screen anymore. Sometimes the translated sentence was too short, it also didn't look pretty. This is how we shortened English words: German also didn't look very well: 3. The most difficult problem was about words order. Every language has different sentence structure. For us, it was important because we like to replace some words with symbols for people, food, resources, etc. But in order to construct the correct sentence, all symbols must appear in the right places. During translation, words order was often messed up and we had troubles placing symbols in the right places.
Game localization is a very important, but not the most apparent step in game development. No matter how small your game is, a good translation can increase the number of potential buyers. On the other hand, a not so good translation can scare them off. Our games - Stone Age, Bronze Age, Marble Age, Predynastic Egypt and soon to be released Egypt: Old Kingdom are translated into 13 languages in general. We'll be glad to share our experience and talk about a few unexpected problems we had to deal with during localization. The original language of our games is Russian, so the first step was to translate it into English. When our team still had only one member and when the first game, Stone Age, was created, there was no choice but to pay for translation. It wasn't the best choice not only because of money but also because translators-outsiders probably would not be aware of what game they are translating. It makes mistranslation possible. Thus, we decided to translate the next game, Marble Age, ourselves. The translation we made knew no proofreading, no editor's eye... well, you can guess how "great" this translation was. We got criticized for it a lot. Nevertheless, the goal was achieved - both games got translated into English. Later both translations were revised and edited by natives. Now to get the game translated into English is only half a battle. It helps to attract more players among English-speakers, this includes people who speak other languages as well. Thanks to the fact that we put a lot of efforts in making our texts interesting and informative, we soon got many offers of help from people who wanted to translate our games to their languages! Needless to say, we were only happy to accept. The first volunteer came from Spain, and Marble Age got its Spanish version. Since then our friend from Spain became one of our most supportive volunteers and helped to translate other games as well. Later another volunteer from Turkey appeared. Then another one from Germany. They all had to spend several weeks, helping us to localize our games. But as we all started to work together, we found out that our games are not designed to accommodate translations. These are basic problems we encountered:
- Correct display of translated texts. Other languages can contain diacritics - special symbols which can be all around the letter, for example sometimes you can see the word "naïve" with two dots instead of one, or like in many French or Spanish words, like "Rêver" or "niño". The most extreme case of this problem, though, is when the new language is not Latin alphabet based, for example, Chinese or Hindi.
- The screens of our games were designed to fit Russian language sentences. Sometimes when the text got translated into other languages, the length of a sentence changed, and it didn't fit into the screen anymore. Sometimes the translated sentence was too short, it also didn't look pretty. This is how we shortened English words: German also didn't look very well:
- The most difficult problem was about words order. Every language has different sentence structure. For us, it was important because we like to replace some words with symbols for people, food, resources, etc. But in order to construct the correct sentence, all symbols must appear in the right places. During translation, words order was often messed up and we had troubles placing symbols in the right places.
