Language support?

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by NinthNinja, Mar 26, 2011.

  1. NinthNinja

    NinthNinja Well-Known Member

    Jan 31, 2011
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    What are peoples views on language support in games?

    Personally I think it is a good thing to implement because after all English is not the only main language of the world.

    I think supporting these languages are important if you want to seem professional in the App game market:

    English
    French
    German
    Spanish
    Italian
    Chinese
    Japanese
    Korean
     
  2. TinyTechnician

    TinyTechnician Well-Known Member

    Apr 21, 2010
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    Los Angeles
    Language support is a tough one. I would love to support EFIGS + Asian/Eastern countries but that usually comes at a cost. With the way the App Store game is played these days it seems better to put as much effort and polish into an App you're making and release it. If it does well then keep supporting it and maybe here is where you start adding language support.
     
  3. dansu

    dansu Well-Known Member

    Feb 27, 2009
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    San Francisco Bay Area
    What TinyTechnician said.

    Localization certainly would be nice to have but, assuming your resources are limited, your time and money are probably better spent fine tuning other aspects of your game that would be more critical to its success. Of course, once you have a hit on your hands, you can afford to spend some time and money on localization. In the meantime, I would say it helps to at least build your game with localization in mind in case you decide to add additional language support later.

    Personally, I'm using what I call "poor man's localization" which means I try to use icons instead of text whenever I can :)
     
  4. DYS_Translations

    Nov 4, 2008
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    We would like to point out this Touch Arcade thread about translation services for iOS apps.

    We are DYS: Translations and we provide translation and localization services for iOS and Android applications for a reasonable price.

    Since the launch of the iTunes App Store we translated over 1000 applications into multiple languages, and I can confirm the ones listed by NinthNinja are the most important.

    We translate from/into: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, (Simplified and Traditional) Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish.

    Feel free to contact us for further information.

    Have a nice day,
    Seiko.
     
  5. TinyTechnician

    TinyTechnician Well-Known Member

    Apr 21, 2010
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    Developer
    Los Angeles

    Totally agree, just because you are not planning on localizing the App (on the first release) this doesn't mean you shouldn't plan for it. Organization of assets and strings would be highly beneficial in the long run if you start off developing with localization in mind.

    Also love the "poor man's localization" tactic (which I've used also). Even if you have English text under icons...the idea of having meaningful icons and UI design will help user's who don't read/speak the language. I'm sure most of us have experienced this...playing some app or game that wasn't in our native language but it didn't really matter since you could understand what you needed to do just based on the icons and presentation.
     
  6. gameview

    gameview Well-Known Member

    Mar 10, 2011
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    Yes, icons and graphic lead can outweigh language. Most time, I didn't pay attention to the language and text instruction, with no patience to read.
     
  7. TinyTechnician

    TinyTechnician Well-Known Member

    Apr 21, 2010
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    Los Angeles
  8. Janus

    Janus Member

    Mar 28, 2011
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    Game Development
    London
    Our game Cup Stack is localized for romance langauges, but we havn't (yet) included Japanese, or other Sinitic/Japonic languages..

    Localization is relatively cheap and a lot of companies that provide the service do so at a very reasonable rate (which usually includes making minor updates to the local files for free). We used a company called Game Localization Network. I highly recommend them...

    If you are on a shoe-string budget instead of just resorting to menu/graphic icons with no text you can always use Google Translate. We actually used this for some very minor updates. (you can download google translate as an app now..)

    I wouldn't recommend trying to include Japanese/Chinese languages or any language that uses an alphabet that is different from the romance languages. At least not for your first release/update. Not only do you need multiple character maps but some languages have multiple alphabets (I think Japanese has 6 different alphabets!) We had a programmer working for us who was responsible for coding the Japanese localization for one of the Harry Potter games. He said it was one of the hardest things he has ever had to do...
     
  9. artcue

    artcue Well-Known Member

    Mar 30, 2011
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    Gamedeveloper, Co-Founder of Artcue
    Vienna, Austria
    When localising a game, you have to change all UI display strings (you also need to consider the display lengths: in some languages words are much longer than in english), all spoken audio and all in-game text.
    So better think it through at the beginning of the development prozess, even when you are going to do the localisation much later....
     
  10. DYS_Translations

    Nov 4, 2008
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    I don't agree with this.

    Japanese consists of three different alphabets, but this is not a very good reason for not considering this language (even for your very first release).

    Japan is one of the top 3 markets for most of our clients.

    I wouldn't recommend translating your documents in some languages rather than others just because they are less complex.

    This is all about providing the most appropriate file format to the translations agency (we recommend .strings).

    Once you provide a good file format to the translator, he/she'll HAVE TO find a solution to your problem. This is what they're paid for. At least this is what our translators are paid for.

    Always make sure the translations agency will assist you in case you need help after they deliver the finished documents to you.

    All the best,
    Seiko.
     
  11. NinthNinja

    NinthNinja Well-Known Member

    Jan 31, 2011
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    Japanese is not that bad to do - I did it for a console game years ago... it's a pain but if you design from the offset for this language then the problems only become small.

    For our first release we will be including language translation because it's the professional thing to do.
     
  12. dansu

    dansu Well-Known Member

    Feb 27, 2009
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    San Francisco Bay Area
    You guys are approaching this from two different angles.

    True, from a business perspective, supporting an asian language is no different from supporting a western/romance language. That is, you pay translators a sum of money to get all your text (and maybe even voice dialogue) translated. You may have to tweak your game title and a few other things to be more culturally acceptable but if the market is big enough (and, yes, Japan is a big enough market) then you can certainly make it a business requirement to make a Japanese, Korean, or Chinese version of your game, for example.

    However, from a technical standpoint, there is potentially a lot more work involved in supporting a language that contains over 2,000 distinct characters. For example, you may not be able to keep all those characters cached in memory. You can be clever and selectively load only the subset of characters that you need for a given time frame but this takes more work and it will start to break down if you cannot predict what characters you need to display beforehand i.e. chat messages.

    Actually, the decision to translate a game into asian languages is already a given for many big budget PC and console games. For these kind of projects, the cost of localization is a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of developing the finished product. However, for a small budget, indie game where success is a lot less certain, the decision to spend time and money on localization early on is not so easy to make. That's why you hear people like Janus recommending people to hold off on "difficult" (*) localizations, at least initially.

    I believe a sensible approach is to spend a little bit of time thinking about how you would handle localization early on during your development to make it easier on yourself later on if you do decide to add foreign language support.


    (*) I have probably spent more time thinking about localization than I wanted to originally. Ok, I'll admit it. I actually built a prototype to make sure it would work in my case. That is, I am using UIKit to draw foreign language fonts over my OpenGL layer and I'm still running at 60 FPS (on a 1st gen iPhone nonetheless). I was kind of afraid of mixing UIKit with OpenGL at first but I figured I would rather spend my time building a game instead of a robust streaming font engine. Also, another nice side effect of delegating font display to UIKit is that supporting asian languages is not any more "difficult" than supporting western languages. You simply pass UIKit your translated strings, in whatever language, and let UIKit worry about displaying the text nicely.
     

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