{"id":2646,"date":"2013-11-28T12:07:43","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T12:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=2646"},"modified":"2013-11-28T12:07:43","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T12:07:43","slug":"german-translation-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2013\/11\/28\/german-translation-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"German translation lessons&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m getting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/democracy3\/index.php?src=cliffski.com\">Democracy 3<\/a> translated into German, if you didn&#8217;t already know :D. This has involved quite a lot of hassle, so i thought I&#8217;d jot down some thoughts and lessons learned. Firstly, I&#8217;d like to make the business case for it. The case is based on this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Germans love strategy games<\/li>\n<li>Germany is the top selling market for the game that does not have English as its first language.<\/li>\n<li>The non-English speaking German population is non trivial. (src: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population\">http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population<\/a>) at 36%.<\/li>\n<li>If I assume that the game has only reached the 64% of potential Germans who speak English, and do the maths, if there is a corresponding bump in sales of the German version, then this will put the port into a decent profit.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Add to this the fact that a lot of people outside Germany also speak German, plus that percentage of people who speak English but would prefer the game in the first language, and I think it makes economic sense. I&#8217;m also figuring in some &#8216;goodwill&#8217; value for translating a small indie game to German.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/gerheaderimage.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Ok, so it makes sense, but what are the costs?<\/p>\n<p>Firstly there is the cost of the actual translation. The game has 34,000 words of text, so that is quite a big expense. I know many indie games &#8216;crowdsource&#8217; this stuff, but I find that a bit risky. Don&#8217;t forget some people on the web are just maniacs, how do you *know* that half way through the description for income tax there isn&#8217;t a huge racist rant, or maybe a load of swear words? or in my case, more subtly, how do I know the descriptions of the voter types and policies have not been skewed to suit the persons political views offering the &#8216;free&#8217; translation? I prefer to have a contract, and right-of-redress for any lawsuits\/damages\/grief&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, there is the fixing of the code. German is loooooooooooong. A simple word in English is often about 10,000 syllables in German. Don&#8217;t believe me? just listen to Henning:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/languages\/german\/comedy\/long_words.shtml\">http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/languages\/german\/comedy\/long_words.shtml<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But I digress&#8230;. What this means is that a lot of text blocks in the game no longer fit. Buttons are not big enough, titles need to word-wrap or be cropped, and so on. Plus of course there are exciting new characters to be added (only a few), and because Democracy 3 uses bitmapped fonts (pre-rendered) I needed to change code to support that (and re-render them all). The vast majority of this work is just scanning through the code and adding scrollbars to text and &#8216;&#8230;&#8217;\u00a0 where it might be needed. The GOOD news (and another reason to do German first) is that once this is done, if I choose to do French, Italian or Spanish, the text should already fit fine.<\/p>\n<p>And lastly, there is the admin cost. The steam promotional graphics need to be changed. My own webpage will need changing.\u00a0 I&#8217;m planning on translating the trailer. New builds need to be made, and the translated content checked so it works ok. Plus I actually need to upload the stuff. Democracy 3 is about 200 MB on disk. It comes in mac,Linux &amp; PC, so thats 600MB. It goes to my site, BMTMicro, Steam and GoG, and the mac game store. This is a huge number of builds. Now double it for German. I have <strong>rura<\/strong>l broadband. This literally starts to take days to upload&#8230; (You can do a &#8216;shared content&#8217; thing on steam, but thats only for steam, so I&#8217;m keeping it simple and just doing totally fresh builds for everyone).<\/p>\n<p>Will it be worth it? Who knows! I hope so, and I&#8217;ll certainly blog about it&#8217;s success\/failure.<\/p>\n<p>BTW <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redshirtgame.com\/index.php?src=cliffski.com\">Redshirt is 25% off <\/a>for a while. Go get it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m getting Democracy 3 translated into German, if you didn&#8217;t already know :D. This has involved quite a lot of hassle, so i thought I&#8217;d jot down some thoughts and lessons learned. Firstly, I&#8217;d like to make the business case for it. The case is based on this: Germans love strategy games Germany is<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; German translation lessons&#8230;<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2013\/11\/28\/german-translation-lessons\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-democracy3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2647,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2646\/revisions\/2647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}