Quote: Original post by Yomar
Mmmh... the silence is deafening. My last article generated a lot more response. Are developers no longer interested in the do's and don'ts of localization, or is the article so boring that you gave up after two lines already?

Nah, I kept reading your page =S I may need a translator for Dutch at some time, you know XD

On the non-space-Japanese thing, an idea that came on my mind: sorta kind of special marks used for "spaces" in Japanese text. You know, the game never renders them but uses them as hints for word wrapping. Actually, isn't that the whole point of the zero-width space? Yes, I know, that could mess up (some) CAT tools, but I bet they can be adapted or you could just get rid of the zero-width spaces with a script.

But I assume that it wouldn't get implemented because bad management practices would force developers to get into other stuff before they get a chance to program it.

Two questions:

1)When talking about not being able to prioritise their project, why didn't you say "I can only prioritise this if I am the sole translator"? Especially when the 2nd guy lost interest?

2)When they brought in other translators, if you had other work why didn't you simply walk away using whatever notice period may have applied? You say you already knew this wouldn't appear on your resume after all.

Dear JDXSolutions Ltd,

That's exactly what I did. During the first phase of the project, it was on top of my list.

When I found out they were bringing in other translators, it got a much lower priority, so that they had to bring in even more translators. During this phase, I worked on many other projects.

During the third phase, when they promised to once more let me become the sole translator, I put the project on top of my list again - not because I wanted to list it on my resume (I still doubt whether that will be possible), but to create goodwill for possible future projects.

Very interesting article. That translation-from-translation thing is very common here in Spain in the movie trade due to the limited market (big budget films usually have a spanish version and at least a south american one).

It's still worse when a german company decides that german "translators" which know a little bit of spanish should do the l13n. I specially noticed this when playing Shadows over Riva. The translation made horrid a really fun game with a very very interesting story (IMHO, anyway).

Now I have a question. I'm developing a game and trying to think about localization. As an example, for an item list I would have an XML like this:



Is this a good way to do it, from a translator point of view? Any advice about it?

Thanks a lot!

That's definitely a good way! I'd implement an extra meta tag for clarification about certain strings, so that you'll never need to answer the same question twice.

What kind of clarification? Could you please show an example?

Quote: Original post by Yomar
That's definitely a good way! I'd implement an extra meta tag for clarification about certain strings, so that you'll never need to answer the same question twice.

Sure!

Like:
<name lang="en">Magic cane</name>
<desc lang="en">This will give you 5 extra magic.</desc>
<meta lang="en">This is not the cane that old people use to walk, but a cane from a plant.</meta>

It is to provide extra (and much-needed) context for shorter strings. One of the questions you will get most by the way is "Noun or verb?"

I.e. whether the word Copy is a noun (the copy) or a verb (to copy) makes a huge difference in many languages:

<name lang="en">Copy</name>
<meta lang="en">Noun!</meta>

Also, I can recommend to hand each translator a full copy of the game with cheat codes. The more context you give them, the better the translation will be. Most game translators will play the game for free if it gives them more context.

Thank you very much, Yomar. It makes a lot of sense now.

I know that some testing labs actually have a bad habit of actually having performance review based on number of bugs found which is not a good idea but the easiest way out. Hence you get some really weird bugs or duplicated bugs. Some testers are just clueless. Maybe in your case it was the same.

Also most frustrations come when there is middle man in between the developer and the actual person doing the work. It is far easier to work without the middle man in between. But you will get x,y and z reasons for not allowing access directly. Sometimes though the x,y,z reasons are valid as there might be contractual obligations.

How would you handle strings with variables in? It's quite common to see strings such as "You found a <ITEM_NAME>" or "Good morning <NAME>", and I imagine this could cause problems in languages where the gender of words affects the rest of the sentence (French) or you use different language structure based on the difference in status between two people (I think Japanese has this). Am I right, or do you generally not have to meet such levels of correctness?