Right now, Galactic Civilizations III supports:
Because of the way we made Galactic Civilizations III, translation is very expensive. There are a lot of words. But nearly all of it is in the technology descriptions.
In this screenshot you see the short-description.
And this one shows the long description.
Translation costs by the word. That long description has 38 words and each civilization has their own tech tree and each tech tree has hundreds of potential techs. Thus, translating to the other languages we want to translate to costs tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, in the bigger scheme of things, this isn’t that much money. But there are definitely languages where we won’t make that back. So we have to put some thought into it.
So which languages should you translate to? There’s a lot of data on that so I won’t bore you with the details. But let’s look at what some other games translate to.
Here’s Stellaris:
Here’s the new Master of Orion:
Here’s Rocket League:
And it would be insane not to include Civilization VI:
Meanwhile, Ark? It supports 21 languages, all with full audio.
But none of that can hold a candle to Counterstrike: 25 languages.
Steam page translated
MOO: Steam page in other languages
GalCiv III: page translated
What to support and how much?
For one thing, the largely redundant long tech description is not something that really needs to be translated. It could just use the normal description. This is what most games do (as in, nearly all games). We just tend to be a lot wordier. We’d continue to support the 4 languages we have but then add:
We’d do the first 4 soon and the last 3 later since those would require some changes to our UI system to fit.
We live in a world of many languages and that’s a good thing. Language is the key to culture and makes our world a richer place. I just wish it was less expensive to translate it all.
Screenshots of the week:
by starmac45
by Radaney
by 41ndigo
Have you thought about asking the community to help with translations? Or if that is not to your tastes, giving a brief guide(or allowing if its not something that is moddable atm) so the community can if they so chose make translations of their own?
Edit:
You could make a competition for it or something (Im sure a free code for this or that is cheaper than your current route)
I am willing to do Afrikaans translations, if there is any demands for that language. Which even I doubt there is, lol
Send me a private message, I work for a business that can easily save you many thousands on translations (among other things)
Machine translation is pretty accurate now. Why not just start with that, and then have some members in the community volunteer to give it a once over, then it would be ready for release in the new language. Any other mistakes can be fixed through future updates.
out of curiousity, if you use google translate for your commercial product, do you need to pay them?
i read an article the other day about google using neural network to make their translation method to be more contextual and accurate. ms is apparently going along similar path. forgot where i originally read it from, but the google blog article does highlight how much better the effect is. https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for-machine.html
the other funny thing i read is how a game (football manager 2017) got pre-launch review bombed (or some such) by chinese fans due to lack of chinese translation. nothing to worry about until you get a rabid fan base though.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-31-football-manager-trashed-on-steam-by-angry-chinese-fans
When Polish language will be added to the game Galciv 3 and Crusade? ;/
That seems a good idea. Rimworld did it with their game, and it seems to work pretty well. I believe each language as it gets added as a topic in the translation section of their forums is then linked to a project on Github so it is easy for others to contribute.
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