Hello.
I helped translating SOASE Trinity to french (since the official translation was just terrible) and the boxes of the UI were often too small for the french text to fit in. I think other languages might have the same kind of issue. We had to lower the font size and even then, we faced some difficulties. A french translation is generally 1.5 times bigger than its source. If you design your UI with that in mind, you will get nice translations.
Remember: your game could be the best masterpiece of awesomeness the world had ever known, if the translation sucks, the game sucks.
I think they've limited themselves to a 1024 x 1024 minimum resolutions, so this'll be tough. At the same time, great for bringing up something that we're oft prone to forgetting about.
translations always suck my friend be it games, movies or books(especially)
the original is always much better.. no exceptions .. languages just arent that compatible
+ playing in english (if its not your native language) is a great way to improve it.. and English is the worlds most widespread language.. its the British fault
I write software that gets translated as my day job, and this is totally tree. If you take it into account at the start, things are a lot easier. Either make the UI elements big enough initially, or let the translator have an easy way to alter the size as needed to make it fit.
As far as french and german are concerned, I totally disagree with you, ScienceMad. I speak both french and english quite fluently, and I can tell you that Disney movies for instance are a lot better in french than in english, especially when it comes to songs. Blizzard has a dedicated team of translators which localized world of warcraft to french in such a way that you would never guess it was developped in english first. The "english is better" argument is just a trend among young people who need to disrespect their own culture in order to claim their own identity. Well, this is not a universal truth but it's the only excuse I could come up with to explain that kind of bullshit.
This trend is heavily and unwillingly supported by those unscrupulous/poor companies which hire ONE multilangual translator to translate their product in every thinkable languages and sell it abroad. This is the real reason why most translated material suck. And this is the reason why specialized translators like me are jobless: nowadays, one ton of crap is worth more than a flawless diamond.
Now Stardock, be kind. I know that your translation will suck. It's a fact, and I'm okay with it. I'd rather have a good AI than a good translation. Just make it so we have the means to improve it. Give us some space.
Dear french language.. drop the unnecessary letters
Final Fantasy XII got a real good translation. In fact the lore was so well written I used most of my time on the game to read it .
And Nemado, if you need some help to translate into french I can help.
Thanks for the offer, but if I decided to translate Elemental, I would do it on my own. In translation teams there's always the nice guy who thinks he's helping by using google translation and copy-paste. And since I hate that guy, I translate games on my own. That's what I did for the beta of mount and blade. And that's what I ended up doing for Sins. First I took the fan made translation of Entrenchment to port it to Diplomacy. But it was such a pain in the eye that I ended up translating the full game from top to bottom.
Besides, I haven't purchased Elemental yet. Elemental doesn't use tesselated tiles, and a strategy game without this kind of feature doesn't feel right to me. So translating the game is out of question at the moment. I will wait for the demo and if it's good, I'll work on it.
By the way, if you, reader, want to increase the chances of having a translation earlier, you can still offer me the game.
In the meantime, you should start translating the game by yourself. If it's well done, it doesn't matter who does it first.
In 100 years time we'll all be speaking Anglo-Cantonese anyway!
Nemado, VieuxChat, for the case you don't know, the following website http://transgalactique.free.fr/ is dedicated to making unofficial localization of Stardock games. They have already localized GC2 (base + all expansions), Sins of a Solar empire (base + all expansions) and Demigod.
There are also planning to make an unofficial localization of Elemental. I think they are waiting for the XML files to be stable enough (ie. don't come each time from Stardock servers)
This website is where I got the original translation of Entrenchment. Their current translation of Diplomacy is an old version of mine with minor modifications. Mainly the ship names, which were modified to fit the french centered tastes of the team leader (meh). They also fixed a CTD bug which was, to their credit, really hard to spot.
If you want to team up with some motivated people, vieuxchat, you should check them out. Quality is not their main concern though, they just want it done ASAP. I presume it's better than having nothing at all.
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