French Translations?

I thought about Chinese too, but this would bring a whole slew of new factors to deal with. Including the censorship, as you say. But just being unfamiliar with the language would bring a whole bunch of other new problems - familiarity with the market overall, being able to understand and comply with legal requirements, etc. It would probably involve recruiting somebody to work on the Chinese side of things. And it’d be hard to judge in advance whether that would be a worthwhile use of time and money.

So when I say ‘can aim for,’ I should probably say, ‘can realistically aim for, at this time’.

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@PaulGresty
Totally agree. There is a market in France.

We don’t want to take the work of professionals. I just translated a chapter Choice of dragons to show to colleagues. I understand the problem of “motivation”. My colleagues translators explained me the difficulties of that activity.

I don’t know.
Choice of games publishes in English only. However French is the third most spoken language in the world. Do they not want to expand their fan base?
@idonotlikeusernames Chinese is a good idea too. But the studios fear the piracy problems in China.

100 % ok.
The french translator of “Game of thrones”, Jean Sola, is problematic: his translation is very good but he was fired because he didn’t follow the style of george RR Martin.
The french writer Alain Damasio waited ten years and has selected a poet to translate into English his book “La Horde du Contrevent”.

If somedbody wants to translate a game, The ORPHEUS Ruse for example, he must know the code. Separate text and coding (then assemble them) would be a waste of time.

L’information intéressera peut-être les écrivains de langue française ou ceux qui envisagent des traductions.

Nous avons réalisé un fan-jeu d’après l’univers de la Horde du Contrevent d’Alain Damasio, à l’occasion du concours organisé par Folio SF.

Avec un codage UTF-8 nous n’avons pas de problème d’accent.
Et nous avons pu régler la majorité des problèmes de grammaire.
Le “by” sous le titre et les écrans de fin restent en anglais (je pense qu’ils sont déjà inscrits dans le script-source).

(évidemment ce n’est pas un jeu commercial puisque c’est l’univers d’Alain Damasio et nous avons écrit aux responsables de Choice of Games pour leur demander leur autorisation)

Pour jouer, il suffit de cliquer ici.

ou entrez cette adresse dans votre barre:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38084554/La%20onzième%20horde%20d’après%20Alain%20Damasio/web/mygame/index.html

Spanish would probably be good too, that captures most of South America, Spain itself and a chunk of the Carrbibean. However judging by people like @Jjcb the latest generation over there speaks better English than I do, so it might not be necessary to translate.

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Spanish is a good idea.
I don’t know why studio don’t sell any game in South America.
But the translation will be a problem (because of Spanish grammar)
My wife works in Spain. I will ask her what she thinks.

While I greatly thank you for the compliment, I should say that I’m not exactly fit to use as an example. I had a great teacher, a friend that I could practice both my grammar and vocabulary with, aside from an english channel with english subtitles that I could use as reference. I don’t think that everyone would have the same advantages as I do to learn.

Besides, my english greatly improved after joining the forums, seeing as everyone had above average knowledge of the language.

If I had to choose, I’d say that @poison_mara would be a way more accurate example.

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Totally agree with you. Our English in general keeps being really lacking, here in fact I am consider a well versed English speaker. Still Spanish won’t be a great candidate for a translation, too much work because it would need a separate version for male and other for female.

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@Jjcb et @poison_mara
What is your native language?
Spanish?

I agree.
or reprogram the variables to tune common nouns and adjectives?

No, we have to many deviations from common rules in gender pronouns, adverbs, adjectives you can’t make a variable that covers all. So a totally different game from male and female. To that nightmare add the fact if you could choose a npc gender, like happens in many games. Well that character has to have two completely separate translations… so go on… with each gender swap that ports to anyone npc talking about you of that character. Try doing this by yourself it’s suicidal. And don’t even think in touch the code you can’t. To translate a popular game here you need professionals and not only one. Like I said too expensive from an indie company.

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Yup. Spanish is my native language.

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Thanks to the “Choice of games” team, we were able to make our interactive fiction “La onzième horde”. It was much appreciated.

And I finished / completed my French translation of the demo of “Choice of the Dragon”. I did not do the complete translation of the game (I do not want to steal the work of translators that would be paid) but I wanted to show this game to my friends who do not speak English.
The French IF community is small.
I hope the team Choice of Games will allow me to publish the translation of the demo on our sites so that more people will discover “interactive fiction”.

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