13 November 2013

Loss in Translation

For almost as long as King of Dragon Pass has been for sale, people have wanted to know if it could be translated. For example, in 2000 we were approached at the Independent Games Festival by a European publisher, who lost interest when they heard how large the game actually was.

As we’ve expanded the game for iOS, the economics have gotten worse than they were in 2000. An approximate word count puts the game at over 640,000 words. Doing some quick research, it would probably cost around $0.10/word to translate into a European language (such as French, Italian, German, or Spanish). That’s $64,000 just for the translation, and doesn’t take into account any development costs.

It also doesn’t take into account the difficulties of the translation in the first place. King of Dragon Pass tries to be flexible, so that in this fragment,

text: <ourHero> fled as fast as <his/her> feet could move <him/her>.

ourHero can be male or female. But the FIGS languages all have word gender, so “his” would have to be translated differently depending on the gender of the following word (and also whether or not it’s plural). So we’d need to add code support for this.

Worse would be something like

saga: <He/She> killed <theirGuy> with one blow, avenging <his/her> <r>.

since the gender of the following word isn’t known (it might be “brother” or “sister”).

This sort of thing could probably be dealt with, but it would almost certainly be a significant development effort, and also raise the cost of translation.

Is English the Tradetalk of the Internet?
Back to that cost: at the current price, with Apple’s 30% cut, we’d need to sell over 9100 copies of the game just to break even on the cost of translating into a single language.

Is that possible? Let’s take Italian. There are native speakers of Italian outside Italy, but for simplicity let’s just look at the 61 million people in Italy. The USA has about 314 million people, so we could assume sales of about 1/5 that of the USA. Based on our previous sales, half are in the USA. So we’d get 1/10 of our total sales in Italy. This would be great, and it would leapfrog Italy to our #3 market. However, King of Dragon Pass is not Angry Birds. Although it’s a successful indie title, sales are somewhat over 35000 units. 1/10 of that is 3500 copies, which would not pay for the translation.

On top of that, we’d need to devote resources (both programming and quality assurance) to a significant development effort, which would take away from projects such as creating new scenes.

There are some other linguistic issues with how the game generates text, but really it’s not worth belaboring.

We’ve translated our software before (Jigami is available in French, and Opal in Japanese). But not something that is ten times as big as the average book. Some of the strengths of the game (immense replayability and flexibility) make it a money-losing proposition to translate.

14 comments:

  1. Well, I can see why that's a problem, but if you were going to translate it, you should probably go for a really big language, such as Spanish, used not just in Spain but also in most of South America, and in Mexico.

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    1. Sure, though it was easier to look up a single country for the purposes of example. I made a bunch of simplifying assumptions, in actual fact it would almost certainly cost more and return less. And be harder from a technical standpoint.

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  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  3. I agree with this. I'd like to see an expanded system for combat. Text based, commanding your troops in more detail. That'd be so much fun. <3 this game!

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  4. What about using fans and volunteers? I could translate it for free. All i would want is to have my name in the credits, that´s it. What do you think?

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    1. I’ve had mixed success with fans/volunteers on much shorter games. I doubt very much that anyone is going to stick with it for 10 books worth of text.

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  5. Brute force could work. At runtime, compose the text in English as usual, then feed it to a translation service and display the result. That may even handle the gender effects on nearby words in some languages!

    To cover the time delay and errors in poor translation (assuming the reader can recognise some English words), display the text in English then crossfade to the translated text when it comes in, with the option of flipping between the two versions.

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    1. Interesting idea, which I would never have thought of because it requires an Internet connection.

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    2. Well, iPads and iPhones are often online so it could work, and while offline (or waiting for the translation to come through) you can still see the English text.

      There may be a text translation API already in iOS. If not, there's always Google APIs, though I wonder if they'd want something in exchange for using their service.

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  6. oh it would be even more difficult in Polish, you need to change the verbs as well, depending on the gender of the subject :)

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  7. By coincidence, I just got a ballpark quote for translating into Chinese: $0.098/word. So the cost estimate is moderately accurate.

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  8. Hi!
    We translated the indie cRPG The Age of Decadence on Russian and interesting in doing so with the King of Dragon Pass - just for mention our names in credits.

    AoD (http://store.steampowered.com/app/230070)

    Best regards, Ivan "Sunfire" Petrov

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    1. Sorry, we don’t have the resources to add code support for case as well as gender. (Remember, almost all the text is dynamic.)

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  9. Interesting post mortem on localization of an entirely different kind of game: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4d7umm/we_sold_25000_copies_on_steam_in_12_languages/

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