I’ve read ( and play, of course ) some of the games here and i found all of them interesting. I admit that i’m new with this kind of immersive storytelling here, but i want to try to improve myself and ( hopefully ) broaden the range market of your game. And also to encourage Indonesian people to read CYOA games like these, because text-based adventure is basically almost like a novel with clickable desired endings.
I 'll be straight now, i want to offer a free service of translation from English to Indonesian ( and vice versa ). However, i can’t do it very fast. Since i’m also working part-time, if you are interested please PM me and we can arrange an agreement. However, i will still need pointers about your concept, what kind of terminologies that you used, style of language etc.
I can translate menu, story, stats, etc. Just don’t ask me to do the coding though…
And i will do it for FREE and only for one project at a time, because i need to have focus on it. For the moment, i’ll do a maximum translation of 35.000 words. ( Hurray! )
That seems very generous of you! I would suggest also adding a word limit to translations since games can be anywhere from 30 to 400 thousand words. Nevertheless, I’m sure people will be very grateful for your offer.
Hum dude… Do you even realize what you’re getting into?
I think the average game is about 200000 words. That’s the size of the biggest Harry Potter books.
Let’s say you work at the average translator speed which is around 2000 words a day (8 hours/day, including proofreading). You work part time so I’ll divide that by 2 so 1000 words for 4 hours.
Basically you would need 200 days and 800 hours of work to translate the average games.
It’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t you realize how big the games are since you offer a limit of 1000 words (the smallest game is about 30000 words I think).
Honestly, this is your offer. Might sound a bit ridiculous, but… this your offer.
Translating a book for free might sounds like a huge task to tackle, but writing them is no less huge! The work of passion is a reward in itself (although a bit of penny’d help along the way)
But in the end, you’re the one offering the help. I’m not discouraging you to help or not-to-help ppl, but I’ve read your post that you want to improve yourself. Perhaps this is a good exercise for that?
Well, it’s true this thing you’re doing might actually bigger than what you might thought, tho.
Also, remember that the market for CoG games is pretty small, even in English which is one of the most spoken languages in the world. We are talking about something like… Let’s say 10000 buyers and that’s if it’s a hit. Most games won’t even go beyond a few thousands. Take Fallen Hero, easily one of the best games of this year, with a very popular theme (superheroes). It has over 10000 downloads (which means anywhere between 10000 and 50000) on Google Play. Not even a tenth of the people who downloaded it will go past the demo. And that’s the main market.
Considering that, like everything, most purchases occur during the first few days, that Indonesian is not a common language and taking my previous post into account… Well, you wouldn’t even gain much recognition from that.
Sorry if I don’t sound supportive and seem tp be an ass, but those are facts.
English to Indonesian translation might be hard though… di bahasa inggris ada “He/She/” (not gonna include “they” 'cause we have “Mereka” dan di Bahasa Indonesia…? kita cuma punya “Ia/Dia”.
Trust me, i had this idea once… but decided to throw it away and focused on making my own game… wkwkwk. eh… ini cuma opini gw aja sih, kalo agan masih mau coba yah, silahkan.
The grammatical gender isn’t really a problem in this part. Even the phrase “She eats sandwich while he fixes the car” can be easily translated into “Sarimin makan sandwich selagi Bejo betulin mobil,” changing the pronouns into the name of the referred person.
As long as transcreation/localization goes, nothing is as hard as translating individual words itself. Some words might have to be translated into 2 words or more, increasing the memory usage of the translated work.
I mean…
Terjungkal = Tripped backward (or forward?)
Meanwhile = Sementara itu
However = Akan tetapi
Kura-kura = turtle
