Games in SL: Internationalization

[Oni Horan]

I realize that this part of the forum won't be read by people who don't speak english, but it's still an interesting point to bring up. SL is used by people from many different nationalities, speaking different languages too. Some of these communities are actually fairly big and it's sometimes hard to be aware of that because they are simply seperated.

What I really haven't seen much so far is games being translated into other languages. For example, when we released LOGOS cards we instantly attracted a lot of attention by the japanese community, they made their own translations on the web so they could play, but in the end that is not the same.

This is probably where money comes in, translating software is not an easy process, especially if you ask for quality. Personally, I don't know of many games that have been translated into several languages, I wonder if anyone had any experiences with that!

Even more importantly, maybe there are games out there in other languages that us english speakers can't play?

[Karsten Rutledge]

I struggle with this myself. Occasionally someone sends me a translation of the basic playing instructions for my games in another language, then I run it through Google Translate just to make sure it sounds reasonably like it is all game related, then I include it with the game. It doesn't happen often though, and is really a suboptimal solution, especially since it's only tiny part of the instructions.

I get asked for instructions in other languages a lot, but I don't really have a good solution. Google Translate lets you enter a URL to translate an entire web page, I often do this and then send the translated link to people, but as everyone knows...machine translation isn't great.

I haven't seen any games that aren't in English, but I'm sure they must exist.

[Loki Eliot]

During one of my quest games in New Babbage i used Video and spoke in english. I had quite a few people requesting transcripts of the words because even though they could not understand english spoken word they were able to understand english written words. I found this very interesting so i now have english subtitles on my video sequences.

It has to be recognised that there is a big amount of non english speaking residents. In my last game i tried to cater for 3 most spoken languages. I think it was English, Spanish and portaguise. I think i chose these three from a list of most spoken languages, but it could be wrong

In the end the best global games are the ones that are so intuative that the only language needed to play them is intuition. Its far harder to accomplish than it sounds. :-p

[Aeon Voom]

I got a large japanese fandom as well with my brand. And they somehow manage to translate my manuals (which can be large sometimes) or explain it to each other.

Then there are people who speak spanish and of course portugese (alot brazilians on SL) . So i sometimes wish i had a really reliable persons to translate my manuals.

Why live people? I do not trust translators. In japanese you can be only sure about one thing: it will translate gibberish.

[Jen Shikami]

We had to get or hire live translators for our 7Seas game manuals. It definitely makes a big difference in our support requests, particularly the Japanese and Portugese ones. Japanese in particular... we actually had a customer service rep for a while who knew a good chunk of Japanese and that was a huge help.