Publishing and Language (and Translations)

Unlike a traditional book, the alternate text would be a nightmare. Pronouns, branched sentences, modifiers, qualifiers… the Choice aspect would make this a much bigger project than a simple book.

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@jasonstevanhill

You know what, I wonder if it would be possible to put something like this on Kickstarter?
Their FAQ suggests that the people who pledge only get charged if the project reaches its funding goal.
https://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/kickstarter+basics?ref=footer

This way if the project doesn’t reach its goal, Choice of Games will have an actual measure of interest in this sort of thing, and can structure their subsequent translation endeavors accordingly.

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You know, we were actually just talking about this.

The problem is, there’s no way to reach that market.

See, our English-language readers don’t need our games translated into Spanish (or PT-BR), so they’re not going to donate money to the project. I mean, some people might throw in a few dollars, but not anywhere near what you need to get to $45k.

And those who speak Spanish don’t know about us (and the ones that do, probably already speak enough English to get by with most of our games).

Moreover, Kickstarter is heavily tilted towards the English-speaking world. It’s not like there are thousands of hispanophones trolling Kickstarter looking for Spanish-language projects to support.

So, yes, we like the idea of using Kickstarter to fund such a project, but we don’t see how we could access the communities that would both be interested in the product and be willing to contribute in sufficient amounts to make it happen.

And, Carlos, you’re right that people don’t get charged if the project isn’t funded, but $45,000 means we don’t actually make any money on the project. It just means that we break even (or, actually, lose money, because Kickstarter + Amazon payments takes 10%). So, all the time that we would invest in promoting the Kickstarter, coming up with a marketing campaign, etc etc would be unremunerated.

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https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-ya-esta-disponible-en-espana

edit:

As for the marketing campaign, well I’ll leave that to the professionals. Choice of the Dragon was translated into Spanish though, right? And that game is free? Assuming that it wasn’t a labor of love and COG expects to recoup their investment, some of the strategy for how to do that must either exist, or be in the works. How much of that could carry over to the next project?

Also yes, you’re right, of course, about the potential money loss while the project is in the works. But is that amount less than the $45,000 estimate + overhead? The idea of mine isn’t a silver bullet, but at the very least I hope it helps. :slight_smile:

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Yes, we hoped to recoup our investment. We spent $7000, and have made less than $50 so far.

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Ahh. Well. In that case, the sales so far clearly don’t support the decision for another potential major loss, despite apparent interest.

(thinking)

How about increasing the cost of the project to offset the overhead, spending no money on advertising, and see how much people actually pledge in a 30 day period? You could always cancel and restart if it begins to look feasible.

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Hello all, I want this game in spanish too and I could help with that. Seeing all the replies it’s obvious that the money it’s the bigger problem. You guys speak about prices like US$45.000, I could do for just a fraction of that or even for a price that is almost symbolic because it’s my first job.
I promise a job well done, only need the guidelines of the novel’s author to follow all his considerations with regard to ambience, kind of communication, characters’s personality and other factors that he thinks give immersion to his product.
This kind of job is an adventure and a hobby to me. If anyone’s interested in this or in a spanish translation of another novel, i will follow this topic from now on to see your answers.

Greetings since Argentina!

I appreciate the offer, but the errors in English in your post demonstrate why we’d never accept. Moreover, you describe it as a hobby, but this isn’t a hobby. This is our business. It’s not professional to have a hobbyist translation. It would make us look bad.

Moreover, I would argue that you have no conception of how big a job it would be to translate 300,000 words. Seven years ago, when this company was just a hobby, someone offered to translate Dragon for free. It’s 25,000 words. He got through one scene and said, wow, I don’t have time for this; it’s much harder than I thought. I hazard that you would have the same reaction.

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Maybe this could be the next contest?

You could put up the source for one of the older, free Choicescript stories and put up a symbolic or real reward for translations into various non-English languages. I don’t know about Spanish but I’m pretty positive that there’s a market for CYOA style stories with French and German speaking audiences. I do admit I don’t know how strong. But with a contest setup where you give away a non-monetary prize (credits CAN go a long way for an enterprising translator) or just a percentage of the take with no money up front you could somewhat safely test those waters.

Of course I have no idea how you’d judge those translations unless you have trusted native speakers available.

Still seems doable to me IF there is any interest in reaching out to those language communities.

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Did you read the other thread about translations?

Great insights… I speak fluent Spanish and was considering translating Tokyo Wizard, but that $50 comment from @Jason has put a complete break on that!

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It would be easy to allow through the steam workshop fan made translations of the games, right? I mean, it will allow to reach more people and you guys don’t have to spend money in it because the community will be glad to participate in the creation of the mods.

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You might not realize it but translation is hard work. It’s not like you just go through a text and translate it word for word. You definitely have to rearrange grammar. Occasionally languages use different cases or other aspects of grammar are handled entirely differently (eg. Russian has an extra instrumentative case English doesn’t have, Latin even has two extra cases, German or Japanese have a completely different way of dealing with prepositions each etc.).

Then there’s consistency. If ‘ranger’ in the Tolkien sense is relevant to your story then you don’t want to translate it as such at times but use the equivalent of park ranger or army ranger at other times. So you need to keep a running tally of central words you need to constantly check back on.

And that’s just the big time wasters in my opinion.

All of which is to say, translation takes time. Hiring a freelance translator means you pay from anywhere like 10 cents per word at pre-agreed milestones, usually. If they’re slow, it’s their money and you only pay once you have your results. For something not time-sensitive it’s much more sensible either way. After all, an in-house translator would draw a wage no matter how slow or fast they are.

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Sorry if someone has already mentioned it on the thread, but how about letting the developer of the game handle the translation?

Allowing us to submit our games in more than one language and just producing some way for the files to overwrite themselves after the player decides which version it wants to play. (Instead of publishing two different apps)

I know there are some responsibilities that would come along with that(double the revision, double the fixes), but that could just be passed along to the developer, as it is normally a contractual obligation anyway.

Perhaps, uh, something on a smaller scale, to test the waters?

Please? :frowning:

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I’m firmly on the side of professional translation. There are a number of English games on the Hosted Games page I’ve given up on and not bought - despite the premise being interesting - because the author is terrible at English. There are WIP’s that if they don’t get abandoned will almost certainly flop for the same reasons.

I don’t know how it is for those of you with English as a second or additional language, but for me as a native British English speaker, some of the stuff I see is incredibly difficult to read and “fix” on the fly in my head - so much so that it just isn’t worth trying to.

I can foresee all these offers of amateur translations picking up a mangled interpretation of the English and not producing a coherent native language result.

So again, I’m firmly in the “if it can’t be translated properly for a profit, don’t bother” camp.

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I am Brazilian and I would like to play in my native language, but I know that and ridiculous to just think of the idea, why the public of this type of game here in Brazil and very small, first mind, because most Brazilians do not like this type of game. Quite the contrary they flee as the devil flees from the cross here in Brazil and graphics first story after.

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Boa sorte, nós estamos no mesmo barco :smiley:

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Then why don’t you offer your service to check grammar etc to people? For free. There’s plently of WiP threads that surely don’t live up to your standards.

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Our country has over 200 million people in it, and plenty of gamers. Yes, most are either casual or prefer graphics over narrative, but one could argue that to be the case for the rest of the world too.

What we don’t have is enough representation, in my opinion.

I’ve shown excerpts of a Choicescript game written in PT-BR with a brazilian setting to a dozen of people of different backgrounds and tastes, and they were all amazed by it, either because they never thought of a story as something that could be playable, or because they never saw the specific aspects of our culture represented in any game.

Yes, we have lots of shallow games that satirize local politicians(Lula, Dilma, Temer, Bolsonaro) or that are about memes(Trenzinho Carreta Furacão), but those are made either for the laughs of for the press attention(and they sure get it). Other than that, most of the local productions focus on fantasy settings and aim for the international market.

And yes, they have their reasons, but I think there’s a huge market gap made of people who want to play something with an adult tone that realistic depicts our society’s struggles with crime, corruption and inequality. The Favela itself is strong enough of a setting that could please both local and international audiences, given a compelling narrative.

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Because I’m not interested in doing so. Certainly not for free. I stick to pointing out quick fixes in the more competent WIP’s.

At the end of the day its no skin off my back if a game is atrocious - I just don’t buy it and move on, its the authors’ responsibility to ensure their product is fit for sale.

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