Publishing and Language (and Translations)

General
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Hello everyone!

I’m not a native speaker of English, so, please, forgive my grammatical errors.

That said, I have some questions about publishing a game on Hosted Games. I’m new on ChoiceScript, and was wondering about how I can publish my game after I finish, etc.

The second question is: the game have to be necessarily in English? I’m not fluent on the language, principally when it comes to writing, so I was wondering if I can publish my game on my language, Brazilian Portuguese, and forward translate him to English. Is this even possible, or I can only publish him on English?

That’s it, one more time, forgive my bad English, I have revised the text several times, but I’m still learning English.

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Pretty sure you can’t publish through hosted or choice of games in any language other than English at the moment. If you are making it free and not earning any money from it, I think you can host it elsewhere. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong), otherwise you’ll need to pay to use the coding.

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So do I. That’s why we have this lovely community forum to track down those pesky grammatical errors that we missed :open_hands:

And about this one:[quote=“Arkanos, post:1, topic:23888”]
Brazilian Portuguese, and forward translate him to English
[/quote]
I often stuck in writing, and found the best way to break it is to phrase the wording in Indonesia and manually translate it to English. Keep in mind, it’s manually translating. Google translate sucks.

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Regarding publishing, here is the technical information you’ll want to look at, and we now have a web portal for submissions. If you’re having difficulty with it you can also email us about the page via hosted-submissions (at) choiceofgames (dot) com.

As for languages, at this time, we can only publish Hosted Games in English, but we do accept submissions from non-native English speakers written in English.

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Thank you all!

My questions have been saned.

The only problem that remains is my lack of fluency in English… :joy:

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I know this is a few days old, but I stumbled over it anyway.
The thing is with translations, that it doesn’t require that amount of money and no, it doesn’t take a professional translator to properly translate a game.

You need someone with a good understanding of English and their native language, preferably someone who is a gamer (and has a bit of knowledge about the game/genre/setting) and who would love to have something in their CV. Then you need a handful of native speaker of said language, who would love to proofread/beta the game. The cost would likely be a number of Steam Keys for the game equal the number of people involved, as well as editing a few lines in the credits. Fine, maybe have an extra round of beta testing/QA to make sure the implementation is good but that’s it and to be honest, the CoG and HG games need way less implementation checks, due to the dynamic text fields, in comparison to VNs.

I say this, because I have been translating games for around 6 years as part of my jobs and I do not have a diploma in anything translation. I have a master in North American literature, a hunger for games and the will to put in some time to make those games available for my fellow Germans.

While this is certainly something I am being paid for now (among other responsibilities), I have offered free translation services to indie developers and all I asked for was my name in the credits and copy of the game. That’s it. I have a list of games with my name in the credits, which I was willing to provide as reference. Yet, there was no interest.

While this is certainly up to every dev, every publisher and every company to accept or deny this sort of offer, saying that it would cost $45.000+ is not accurate, if you are willing to give people a chance, who do not have a degree.

Additionally, believe me, when I say that I have seen games and texts that were translated much more natural – and simply better – by novices with a proper feel for the language than professional translators (with a diploma) who have no interest or knowledge in the genre.

I would also like to point out that I am not saying every native speaker with knowledge of the English language will be a good translator and certain aspects should never be translated by a novice (e.g. legal texts) but to insist that it requires a professional is something I cannot agree with.

And if a company is so unsure about the quality, yes, it could be offered as a service provided by fans. Nothing official (until it has maybe proven itself) but something that happened with the agreement or permission of CoG or HG. There are so many games with language mods on Steam, which were created by fans for their fellow native speakers … it should be an indication that there is a market for more than just English novels of any kind.

I don’t mean to step on someone’s toe, but I just wanted to put my personal experience out there.

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adding to this. someone above said if someone plays through the demo, they should be fine with the rest even if it’s not translated into their native language.
Not really.
Translating stuff in your head can become a task that drain the overall enjoyment. Not to mention (don’t remember if I said that) I tried recommending the games to friends that said that the premise sounded awesome and they were okay with the price, but they don’t think they’ll enjoy it much in english due to them not being that fluent.
I also see this exact reason with older friends (40+), so it’s missing out on quite a chunk of demographic here.

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They did translate Choice of the Dragon into Spanish, but I think it wasn’t very successful in money terms, hence the reluctance to translate other games.

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Hmm, I guess then those friends of yours will have to get used to the fact that if they aren’t willing to put up with translating stuff in their head for themselfes then their options for books, games etc will be more limited.

I’m Hungarian so obviously english isn’t my native language either, I’m not even that good at speaking english given how I only learned it for 4 years back in school. But I got better at understanding english texts while I was playing games, read books in english or just simply used the internet. See? All I did was practicing it and now I have much more options than those who understand only one language. Actually I even like the challenge of translating stuff (but I understand if not everyone shares that interest).

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Why would it be that succesfull? Those who understand english has already read it. Probably there were some people who actually appreciated it bc they don’t understand english or it’s easier to read in their native language, but probably those aren’t many people compared to those who understand english too or simply isn’t interested in this game. The same would go for every other translations.
I understand it if they translate popular games like Skyrim, Fallout or Mass Effect etc. but for a CoG/HG it doesn’t seem worth it.

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Sorry, but I can’t agree with this being a good argument.
Do or die - understand English or you are not getting entertainment.

Why do you think most developers have either a translation team or hire an external translator?
And while I am personally enjoying my games, books, movies and shows in English, I know a lot of my countrymen who’d prefer to do so in German. Some simply feel overwhelmed with English in everyday life and want to focus on their native language, others simply are not as sufficient and fluid in English to be able to enjoy it.
To say that they are either good enough or not interested is incorrect.

I could mention as an example, that here are a bunch of Japanese an Korean games I’d love to play. However, the only thing that I DO understand about them are the GooglePlay Images and the occasional English review. My curiosity is peaked, but my ability to just learn Japanese on the side, while having my job and other responsibilities is limited.

The same goes for friends and acquaintances. Many of them are around 40, have a families and jobs and they do not want to spend the energy they have left in studying English. They have little free time as it is and would be able to fully understand and appreciate said time, instead of trying to figure it out with limited knowledge in English.

And to say it’s not worth it for games from CoG or HG, then I only agree, if you stick with the $45K needed to translate it.
Additionally, it is not just AAA titles that offer translations or have included fan based translations.

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That is probably on of the most racist, elitist, ableist, backwards arguments and pseudo-logic I have heard in a while.
It’s totally not as if some people really struggle with other languages. etc.
Please, stop talking for and over over people, cause going by your words I DOUBT that you understand anything about why people would prefer a translation.

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I can relate to what you said about Japanese and Korean games. I feel the same way about them: I would like to play with them but I don’t understand the language.

But I also understand that maybe not all companies can afford to pay translators. There are big companies with popular games to them it’s worth to pay translators but developers with games more on the indie side… I don’t think it would be worth that much to pay a translator. And what if they would translate the game to German? Then what about Spanish, French and other more common languages? And there are also languages which are speaken by even less people (Hungarian for example). You just can’t make everyone happy. There will be people who will either have to accept things the way they are or adept to the situation.

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He didn’t really say anything inaccurate.

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They said ‘Oh I learned english and I enjoyed the challenge therefore it is utter nonsense that there should and would be people NOT thinking like that. And if, they are inferior beings’
That is what they said in essence.

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*She (twenty characters)

Edit:
@MeltingPenguins That’s not exactly what I meant with that, I just shared my own experience. And I also admit that maybe I’m this way bc I’m from country with a less common native language so really it’s just the way it is here that either you learn other languages or you just accept that there are less stuff to choose from.
And I didn’t meant to say anything bad about those people who find it hard to learn languages. I’m just just having a less good opinion about those people who would understand a text on another language than their on but they don’t want to bother with translating it for themselves and expect that they get everything in their own language. And no this isn’t necessarily about your friends rather it’s based on reviews which I read.

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I don’t see how *she said they’re inferior beings, she said that if you don’t want to exert the effort to manually translate it in your head naturally there will be less books to read since it’s not often profitable to translate them into other languages. It’s just the way things are.

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Have you been reading the thread?
The sheer fact that you missed the whole discussion about
‘Hey, there’s an entire part of the demographic that would more than likely buy the games were they available in their native language, and dozens of fans that could provide a high-quality translation for free’
doesn’t really speak well of your reading-comprehension.

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It still is a rather backwards logic.
As said, you seem to assume that most people would enjoy the challenge. But again, there’s an entire demographic that would buy the games were they translated.
Also, food for thought: You based this off reviews you read. Reviews by people not native-english speakers that might have come across as elitist/rude/etc because they were not aware how something comes across?

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Which is why I brought up the fact, that it doesn’t require a horrendous amount of money to have games translated, especially for Indie games and devs, since there are plenty of volunteers. That was basically the entire content of my previous post.
In regards to selected languages (or anything really), yes, you can’t make everyone happy but most games have a language setup they follows which is called EFIGS or EFIGSPR

English, French, Italian, German, Spanish or English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, (Brazilian) Portuguese and Russian

These languages have been selected because they make up the biggest chunk of the language related demography for game-consumers for non-Asian games.

The rest is going in circles.
No/Limited English knowledge - no games - professional translators too expensive - novice translators not getting a chance - Game remains in English

So, how does one know if multi-language market ist beneficial or worth it, if it isn’t even approached? And one single game with one single translation is not a strong enough indicator or proof that it wouldn’t work.

Anyway, I have said what I think, and I am aware that anyone who disagrees with me will find reasons to disagree with me further. As such, I am withdrawing but I do wish everyone a lovely weekend!

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