You’re right and I’m sorry, I meant to make a joke 
Should have made that more obvious, now that I read it again. I’m aware that Gallego and Galician are different, it’s just the bad custom of calling everyone from a country the same. Didn’t mean to offend at all, but I get if I did. What I meant to say is that, yes, the Spanish spoken in Spain and the one from Latino America are really different, so please don’t label something as “Spanish” when it’s specially made for people on Spain. What I meant with neutral is, well, Latino dubs are made in Mexico, mostly, and regionalisms are mostly cut out. Of course it’s not the best Spanish there is, but it is different and has different conventions, which you should keep in mind when translating.
1 Like
Thanks. Trying it out on native speakers is a good idea although this often means even more time and money (it’s a thankless enough task to proofread someone’s work at the best of times). A quick Google Translate of the translator’s work might at least point to some obvious errors. I’d definitely try to go for a translator whose first language isn’t English, for the reasons you mention about being able to pick up things that just sound wrong. The downside of this is many common figures of speech that aren’t taught in English textbooks might get ‘swept under the rug’ or ‘kicked into the long grass’.
As well as names, cultural references may well not work overseas (and I use a lot), so it might be an idea for me to highlight anything that clearly isn’t universal- in one case, the player has an option to ‘jump up and sing a medley of Abba songs’(!)- and ask the translator how to get round this (maybe replace Abba with an Asian pop group, for instance).
So much of it will depend on the translator’s competency and approach. One might do a straight literal translation, another might take their own creative liberties. Ideally I’d want someone who will raise and discuss key issues with me. My number one priority will be to get someone I can have a good email discussion with beforehand.
Thanks for your comments- they’ve certainly got me thinking about things. 
1 Like
So, I’m a native italian speaker, and I would love to read my COG or HG books in Italian. However, I can still understand the books because of my C1 English. I would love to help traslating at least the most popular fictions on the market, I’ve already wrote with ChoiceScript in my life, so I know how to not mess up the code translating. Do you think it would be possible?
This question has been raised before, and what it comes down to is that there isn’t enough demand to justify hiring professional translators, and CoG isn’t going to stake its professional reputation on the work of amateur translators when they have no way to verify its accuracy or quality. If a professional translator with a history of quality work of comparable complexity offered to work for free, maybe they’d consider it - but that would be the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of work.
Most people don’t understand how massive these games can be, or the unique complications that arise in translation. You wouldn’t just have to avoid messing up the code, you would have to make considerable changes to the code to account for linguistic differences. One of the challenges that comes immediately to mind for me is how you would translate the part of the game - usually several pages at least - before the player selects the character’s gender. In English, it’s very easy to write a character of unspecified gender in the first or second person. In Italian, you’d have to avoid using most adjectives.
3 Likes