Translating a game HELP

[TkSilver]

(08-28-2019 11:11 AM)Rekrul Wrote:  So if you take the text off the screen and paste it into a document, it suddenly becomes meaningless?

To be fair you are both sort of correct. It will depend on many things, but I can use an example from the Visual Novel genre of games since it is a good example.

For visual novels there are programs like AGTH (Anime games text hooker) that like the name implies can hook (read) the text in a game and offers up on the side of the game window some machine translated text in a different language. If you play a game with this program you very quickly realize exactly how much goes into a "good" translation. There will always have to be compromises between the intention of the original text and the understand-ability of the text. Idioms and word play very rarely survives translation without either being completely changed or loosing all meaning.

That being said I would like at least the framework to be put in to more games to allow for fan translation patches to be done more easily (if at all in some cases). There is a cost associated to doing this and it will have to be something weighed against the potential for increased sales though and is probably not really feasible on console games. Though, making this standard on PC would be a start.

So no it is not impossible, no it is not simple either, no it is not exactly free (even if the translators work for free), and no there might be enough fans that can do a better job then a "professional" translation (video game "professional" translations have an interesting history). If you take into account character limits for interfaces, the various differences in language (and even culture), and all the other challenges in translating a game besides just extracting and repacking the text in a way the game can read it... it still is a very daunting task to undertake. For the people who do this, I personally would like for game developers to make the process as easy for them as possible though, since it does add a lot to the game industry as a whole.