As I mentioned in my previous post, there are a quite a few traps you can fall into when localising your game or app. Of equal importance, however, is getting all that text translated in the first place. How can you get your game translated without spending a fortune?
The obvious solution is to use an on-line automated translation service, such as Google Translate. This will work, but I don't think anyone expects it to be a 100% perfect translation. For my sins, I have used this service to translate some of the more languages my game supports, such as Malay and Indonesian. For a big market, you need something much better.
My solution is to use oDesk. It's a web site that allows anyone to post a job and anyone to reply to it. For my first translation, I had no idea what I was doing. All up, my text came to about 2,000 words. The game is was translating, Honey Pot was a simple puzzle game. I figured this is the sort of game that is popular in East Asia, so my first targets for translation would be Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I placed an ad on oDesk at a price of US$50.00 for each translation. That comes out at about 2.5 cents a word, which is about average from what I can gather.
I was instantly swamped with a huge number of Chinese language translators. Wow. Maybe this wouldn't be so hard. Confusingly, I had very few Korean and Japanese translators come to the party. Eventually I managed to select a translator for each language and gave them all a week to get it done.
The people doing the work were students studying in the relevant countries. I hoped this would enable them to do a spot on translation. I wanted the text to be informal and quite relaxed. Who better to do it than native speakers, I thought!
I prepared a word document that listed all the text to be translated. I had two columns - one for the text to be translated and then a column for the translation. For most phrases, I also included some explanatory text, so that the translator could put the text in context. For example, "Next Piece" is almost meaningless by itself, so I had some text to explain that the game was played using different shaped blocks and this would be a heading over where the next piece to be played would appear. It almost seemed that the shorter the piece of text, the longer the explanation would have to be! I figured it's all about context, so the more information I could give the translator, the better the result would be!
After a week, the Chinese and Korean translated reported back with complete translations. They had a few questions to clarify some expressions, but generally they had the information to get the job done. Success!
I then had a horrible though - how could I tell if the translation was correct? I couldn't even read the characters, so I had no idea! My only solution, was to run the text into Google Translate and see if the translation in English matched what I had put it. Generally speaking, it all matched. I also tried it the other way - I put my English text in and made sure that the translation wasn't just a dump of the Google Translate text.
After another week, I had heard nothing from the Japanese translator, despite numerous attempts at communication. This is the problem with oDesk. When it works, it works well, but there's nothing you can do when the other end goes silent. In the end, I cancelled the contract, re-advertised and got a good translation done.
As soon as I released the localised version, downloads went through the roof! I think the combination of my cute graphics and the local language really encouraged people to download the game. Alternatively, it could just be that there are so few native Chinese iPhone apps that people will download any old rubbish if it's in their own language! Either way, downloads tripled and I deemed the whole exercise a smashing success. It was super cool to see my app on the charts in China and Japan!
The exception was Korea. Zero downloads! It turns out, that at the time, Apple was banned from selling games in Korea. D'Oh! I probably should have researched that first. Oh well...
In later editions, I used the same approach to translate the app into Thai, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Arabic. Each time a new language was added, downloads in the relevant territories surged. For subsequent translations, I dropped the going rate to $20, which still resulted in a huge number of applicants. At this price range, some of the translations were noticeably rubbish and had to be thrown away, but I think overall that was a great price to use.
So there you go. $20 a pop for each language and the world's your oyster. I still have no idea if any of my translations are actually laced with profanities or baby talk, but the locals don't seem to mind.
The obvious solution is to use an on-line automated translation service, such as Google Translate. This will work, but I don't think anyone expects it to be a 100% perfect translation. For my sins, I have used this service to translate some of the more languages my game supports, such as Malay and Indonesian. For a big market, you need something much better.
My solution is to use oDesk. It's a web site that allows anyone to post a job and anyone to reply to it. For my first translation, I had no idea what I was doing. All up, my text came to about 2,000 words. The game is was translating, Honey Pot was a simple puzzle game. I figured this is the sort of game that is popular in East Asia, so my first targets for translation would be Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I placed an ad on oDesk at a price of US$50.00 for each translation. That comes out at about 2.5 cents a word, which is about average from what I can gather.
I was instantly swamped with a huge number of Chinese language translators. Wow. Maybe this wouldn't be so hard. Confusingly, I had very few Korean and Japanese translators come to the party. Eventually I managed to select a translator for each language and gave them all a week to get it done.
The people doing the work were students studying in the relevant countries. I hoped this would enable them to do a spot on translation. I wanted the text to be informal and quite relaxed. Who better to do it than native speakers, I thought!
I prepared a word document that listed all the text to be translated. I had two columns - one for the text to be translated and then a column for the translation. For most phrases, I also included some explanatory text, so that the translator could put the text in context. For example, "Next Piece" is almost meaningless by itself, so I had some text to explain that the game was played using different shaped blocks and this would be a heading over where the next piece to be played would appear. It almost seemed that the shorter the piece of text, the longer the explanation would have to be! I figured it's all about context, so the more information I could give the translator, the better the result would be!
After a week, the Chinese and Korean translated reported back with complete translations. They had a few questions to clarify some expressions, but generally they had the information to get the job done. Success!
I then had a horrible though - how could I tell if the translation was correct? I couldn't even read the characters, so I had no idea! My only solution, was to run the text into Google Translate and see if the translation in English matched what I had put it. Generally speaking, it all matched. I also tried it the other way - I put my English text in and made sure that the translation wasn't just a dump of the Google Translate text.
After another week, I had heard nothing from the Japanese translator, despite numerous attempts at communication. This is the problem with oDesk. When it works, it works well, but there's nothing you can do when the other end goes silent. In the end, I cancelled the contract, re-advertised and got a good translation done.
As soon as I released the localised version, downloads went through the roof! I think the combination of my cute graphics and the local language really encouraged people to download the game. Alternatively, it could just be that there are so few native Chinese iPhone apps that people will download any old rubbish if it's in their own language! Either way, downloads tripled and I deemed the whole exercise a smashing success. It was super cool to see my app on the charts in China and Japan!
The exception was Korea. Zero downloads! It turns out, that at the time, Apple was banned from selling games in Korea. D'Oh! I probably should have researched that first. Oh well...
In later editions, I used the same approach to translate the app into Thai, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Arabic. Each time a new language was added, downloads in the relevant territories surged. For subsequent translations, I dropped the going rate to $20, which still resulted in a huge number of applicants. At this price range, some of the translations were noticeably rubbish and had to be thrown away, but I think overall that was a great price to use.
So there you go. $20 a pop for each language and the world's your oyster. I still have no idea if any of my translations are actually laced with profanities or baby talk, but the locals don't seem to mind.
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