IMPORTANT: please, make your games strings editable

[Damonya]

the problem is not the actual translation, but use from the start, tools that can help any future translation: unicode standard and string editable.

[thomson]

the problem is not the actual translation, but use from the start, tools that can help any future translation: unicode standard and string editable.

This problem is much more involved than a simple storage. Please see that excellent video posted by Sol_HSA. But there's more than that video explains.

Keep in mind that translating different word nuances and word games is sometimes an impossible task. What about puzzles where you need to pick the letters correctly. Are you expecting the translation to also affect how puzzles work? 5 letter word in English my be 3 letter in French or 20 letters in Polish. Why is Polish any different than French? If you ask for French, I can ask for Polish as well. You can say that French is more popular and more imporant than Polish, but that's a slippery slope. My answer would to be ask for Mandarin, which is spoken by more people than French and Polish combined.

To give you a bit more perspective, think about the release and patching process. Right now AH are able to change anything they want, update description, add a scroll with extra hint for a puzzle that is too difficult etc. They recompile and can essentially publish a patch. Now, if they go with say 10 languages, they need to keep a team of translators that will update all language packs for them. This slows down the whole process tremendously. Not to mention more expensive.

And there's the issue of picking languages. There will always be people disappointed. Hey, there's French translation, why not Italian?

As a non-native speaker, I strongly prefer English games or movies, rather than the translated ones. So many things are lost in translation. Translators may not get something, be not familiar with specific terminology or simply don't have a passion for what they translating. Think about this. AH is passionate about creating games. Remember a thread about discussing how to best describe a trait for a champion that can dual wield a weapon? A typical translator wouldn't bother, and just use whatever the simplest word to describe that in your language is.

[willow]

And there's the issue of picking languages. There will always be people disappointed. Hey, there's French translation, why not Italian?
.

Do you know EFIGs?
EFIGs represent the four languages the most speaked.

[Sol_HSA]

Do you know EFIGs?
EFIGs represent the four languages the most speaked.

The people from china and india would beg to differ (among many others)..

The 10 most common languages according to wikipedia:
- Mandarin
- Spanish
- English
- Hindi
- Arabic
- Portugese
- Bengali
- Russian
- Japanese

[Damonya]

...

Unfortunately you did not understand my point of view. I'm not talking about translation. I'm not even talking about using a dedicated team to internationalisation. The problem now is that even a team of motivated volunteers can not translate LOG1 for 2 reasons: ASCII instead of unicode standard, and no string editable. If I want spend hours and hours to create a translation patch, so I can't do it for these two reasons. Of course the Grimrock team has not the time or the money to translate in x languages​​, but that's not the problem that we point.

[willow]

Do you know EFIGs?
EFIGs represent the four languages the most speaked.

The people from china and india would beg to differ (among many others)..

The 10 most common languages according to wikipedia:
- Mandarin
- Spanish
- English
- Hindi
- Arabic
- Portugese
- Bengali
- Russian
- Japanese

I speak about language and video game market.
except MMO, you can't sell lots of video games like grimrock in China or hindi. Ifnot, all game must be translating in mandarin before english.

EFIGs doesn't exist for nothing. It represents the video games market the most important for occidental games.

[hexaae]

We are a small team and we have to prioritize our work. Localization is a lot bigger task than you would think, especially with the amount of content we have in Grimrock 2. So I'm sorry to say Grimrock 2 will only be available in english, at least in the launch version.

...And as a matter of fact the idea was to make it localizable by community if you would have used a standard string format in simple XML/TXT files like (f.e.) Larian Studios did with Divinity: Original Sin, or many others smaller team than yours do...

Don't misunderstand us, we still love you, but the choice of hard-coded strings unfortunately is very myopic...
Now I understand it may be too late (or not? Chances for an update in the future to change this?).

Hope at least for LOG3 you'll consider this smarter development model for in-game texts, exactly because you seem you can't afford paid translations.

[petri]

I think you misunderstood me. Translation is the easy part, everything else about localization is a lot of work.

[hexaae]

I think you misunderstood me. Translation is the easy part, everything else about localization is a lot of work.

I understand that making your games use external simple plain XML files for the strings, at this point, would be a hard work and hence I wish you LOG2 will be a great success to find the resources for this change to happen.
However I hope you'll adopt this solution in all your future projects and make all foreign language users happy. And thank you for these great games, we have dreamt of since the good old Eye of Beholder days!

[Kelso]

I think the answer is very poor. I think germany is one of the most countries with pc gamers.
And a lot of german gamers would prefer a natural language support.

Editable strings, could be a chance for german fans of LOG II.