Advice on language translation

Warspite2

Member
Getting things finished up here on one of my games recently greenlit on Steam. Planning to release soon. Its only English language right now but i would like to add at very least Korean at launch. I've never done anything with language translations in any of my games so this is a first. First i designed this game with multi language in mind. For example lots of icons instead of text to keep translation at a minimum. However there is still a good bit of text around.

What I am planning on doing is just copying my text lines and pasting them in a translator. Then i will put them back in the game translated. Player will be able to select language at game start.

Is this the way to handle this or is there some software that could make the translations easier and less tedious?
 

Yambam

Member
There are lots of Gettext format translation tools. You could try to make a script to read them, it's really a simple (plain text) format to understand and parse. It also supports many kinds of plurals, even languages that have 5 or more plurals for different numbers.

EDIT: Here is one tool I used for translating my website, it uses translations directly from a database full of uploaded translated Linux programs and more: http://littlesvr.ca/ostd/

Another one is Poeditor.com, Poedit.net for Desktop and https://localise.biz/free/poeditor for quick online editing, even though you could simply open the file up in your favorite text editor as it's pretty much human-readable.

EDIT2: There is even this tool from Google, which uses Google Translate and previous users' translations to automate the process: https://translate.google.com/toolkit
 
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Comedy Rotten

Guest
Translation is an interesting topic. I have read material from other languages that has been fed through Google Translate and other translation machines; they can get close, but often are sub-par and can cause great confusion. I'm actually writing a research paper on machine translation (what Google Translate and other auto-translators use) and one thing that is very much apparent is that there is no substitute for a human translator.

Depending on how much dialogue there is, and what it consists of, it can be incredibly difficult for machine translation to convey the proper meaning. Besides just basic translation (grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.), machine translators are very awful with sarcasm, expressions (e.g. "couch potato" is an American expression that other cultures would not understand), pop-culture references, and names.

Machine translation will get you about 75% of the way, but there is often about 25% that simply will not make sense when translated to another language because of the previously listed reasons. If you are looking to deploy to another language, do your best to find someone who speaks the target language and understands the target culture as well. I don't mean to scare you off or make it seem impossible, but language translation, done right, takes a lot of care.
 

FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
As a native Chinese speaker, I'm telling you this with a straight face: Cut the crap and get a native translator.

I'd assume you are one of those people whose only "language" other than English is Pig Latin. This group tends to be the same people who trust machine translation because they have no clue what came out the other end. People with real fluency in any second language would have seen what machine translation does to it, and would turn up their nose at the thought of relying on it for a third language.

Among language matchups, West European languages vs. East Asian languages is among the absolute worst when it comes to machine-translated outcomes. The modes of expression, word ordering, cultural references and use of honorifics are some of the things that just can't be more different. Machine translation already struggles badly with standard form, just add in titles, paragraphs, idioms or puns and watch it crash and burn.

Gettext banks have a raison d'être because word use tends to be heavily codified in non-game applications. In this case, a phrasebook approach might do for a word or two. But for anything requiring complete paragraphs or even sentences, its utility is negligible for a non-speaker.

And if you think you're done after translating the text, stop believing that nonsense. Proper localization means the redoing certain graphical assets (especially titles), parts of the UI, storyline elements and cultural references to fit, plus ongoing customer support in the target language. This is just a small sample of work that machine translation won't ever do for you.

Anyone who comments on machine translation, without native fluency in the target language, is a moron. Anyone who relies on it for commercial work is an even bigger moron. You being naive enough to think a translation program would cut it means you shouldn't do a Korean release.
 
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CedSharp

Guest
As a native Chinese speaker, I'm telling you this with a straight face: Cut the crap and get a native translator.

I'd assume you are one of those people whose only "language" other than English is Pig Latin. This group tends to be the same people who trust machine translation because they have no clue what came out the other end. People with real fluency in any second language would have seen what machine translation does to it, and would turn up their nose at the thought of relying on it for a third language.

Among language matchups, West European languages vs. East Asian languages is among the absolute worst when it comes to machine-translated outcomes. The modes of expression, word ordering, cultural references and use of honorifics are some of the things that just can't be more different. Machine translation already struggles badly with standard form, just add in titles, paragraphs, idioms or puns and watch it crash and burn.

Gettext banks have a raison d'être because word use tends to be heavily codified in non-game applications. In this case, a phrasebook approach might do for a word or two. But for anything requiring complete paragraphs or even sentences, its utility is negligible for a non-speaker.

And if you think you're done after translating the text, stop believing that nonsense. Proper localization means the redoing certain graphical assets (especially titles), parts of the UI, storyline elements and cultural references to fit, plus ongoing customer support in the target language. This is just a small sample of work that machine translation won't ever do for you.

Anyone who comments on machine translation, without native fluency in the target language, is a moron. Anyone who relies on it for commercial work is an even bigger moron. You being naive enough to think a translation program would cut it means you shouldn't do a Korean release.
I agree with FrostyCat ( even tho it was quite the way to say it haha ).
Machine translation is good for WORDS, after that it's luck. Sometime it gets it right, but most of the time it gets it wrong.
I use machine translation on websites that I visit ( mostly korean, what a coincidence ) and I can tell you that the result is far from even being easy to read.
English is, I think, an easy language to translate, because it doesn't have tons of exceptions or grammar rules ( I am french, so I can compare and yes, english is stupid easy next to french xD )

But even for this easy language, translating in a language that doesn't share much of similarities is near impossible for a machine.
Do the test yourself. Go on any website in a different language with google translate or babel fish, and ask the translator to translate in english.
Then laugh at all the stupidities that you'll see.

Cedsharp
 

Yambam

Member
Sure, machine translations are not perfect, but they are helpful! Especially when using a translation database like OSTD, the results can be quite good and makes the job a lot easier. The way OSTD works is like this:
  1. You upload your PO translation table with the English language (or another base language)
  2. Let the program from the website automatically choose the most frequently used translations of given words/phrases
  3. Now you can choose from multiple combo boxes for alternative meanings/translations, very useful in case a given phrase has multiple meanings
  4. Now you can download the new PO and (compiled) MO files and plug them into your website, game or other projects! :D
EDIT: For further refinement and more involvement from the community, I also let people other than me help with translating my project (like a Wiki): http://gamemaker.mooo.com/nl/language-updater
 
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CedSharp

Guest
Sure, machine translations are not perfect, but they are helpful! Especially when using a translation database like OSTD, the results can be quite good and makes the job a lot easier. The way OSTD works is like this:
  1. You upload your PO translation table with the English language (or another base language)
  2. Let the program from the website automatically choose the most frequently used translations of given words/phrases
  3. Now you can choose from multiple combo boxes for alternative meanings/translations, very useful in case a given phrase has multiple meanings
  4. Now you can download the new PO and (compiled) MO files and plug them into your website, game or other projects! :D
EDIT: For further refinement and more involvement from the community, I also let people other than me help with translating my project (like a Wiki): http://gamemaker.mooo.com/nl/language-updater
So, in other words, you have to manually ajust the translation.
So, in other words, you need to know the target language you are translating to enough to be able to make those manual changes.
So, in other words, you agree with me xD

Regards,
CedSharp
 

Yambam

Member
So, in other words, you have to manually ajust the translation.
So, in other words, you need to know the target language you are translating to enough to be able to make those manual changes.
So, in other words, you agree with me xD

Regards,
CedSharp
Yes and now I just noticed I didn't really mention a real machine translation program (a good one is Google Translator Toolkit), but merely a good database of translations of just (mostly) open source cross-platform applications. Basically everything (all applications and their translations) on it is manually translated by their respective translators. :)

I speak Dutch natively by the way and fluent English (I think at least haha), so I could help with that if anyone needs help with translating something. :)
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
What I am planning on doing is just copying my text lines and pasting them in a translator. Then i will put them back in the game translated.
Yeah, that's always worked out in the past :p
upload_2016-10-23_23-22-23.png

Also, let's not forget the infamous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech by John F. Kennedy, where the translation was technically correct, but was worded in a way which changed connotations. (A berliner is a type of food, so it'd been the equivalent of going to Hamburg and go "I am a hamburger!")

I'm with GameGeisha here, you should always get a native reader to at least proofread the text and point out obvious flaws. Chinese doesn't just have ugly-looking misspellings, changing the order of two kanji can completely change the meaning of a sentence due to the way individual words interact with each other.
 
H

HammerOn

Guest
A note for games heavy in text or story based:
Even native translators can screw it up. There are many recent titles criticized for this.
Grammatical mistakes are an obvious issue but over altered phrases and marshmallow dialogue (embellish, wordiness) not present in the original are also common in bad translations. The translator don't know story writing fundamentals but is trying to rewrite it. They change character personality and the impact the author wanted to give. The result is a dulled experience.
Make sure to get a translator that know how to write. Regular writing, what anyone could do, differs from professional writing.
 
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