So, wow. You’re game has gone far! Or maybe you’re still on your way of development but you’d like a diverse audience to be able to enjoy your game(s).
And we already know the fact that a large majority of games are in English, the same fact that a large amount of developers speak and work in English.
In this topic I’d like to cover some tips on who and what you’re looking for if you’re hoping to translate your games to another language. I will use the languages I’m fluent in as references, English and Chinese. A pretty big gap from vocabulary to writing system to pronunciation, grammar, etc. if you ask me!
To begin, let’s talk about free online translating sources.
They’re easy to use, fast, efficient and mostly because they’re free of charge. However, they’re stubborn. Although online translators are literally much more advanced than before, there’s still bits and bobs that will make it really awkward and hard to comprehend if you directly used the online translation. Let me give you an example…
The phrase “You have my word” as native English speakers will interpret means “You have my trust”, or “I believe you”. In the Chinese online translation we get a text that literally says “You have my word”. No, no… we won’t interpret that into “I believe you”, we literally just hear “you have my word”…
(Also, the Chinese translation can also be interpreted as “Well, if you have me…” the "话“ can mean “well…”. The grammar is also different, placing “well” to the front of the sentence, even though its Chinese character is at the last of the sentence)
Yes! Of course you can just say “I believe you”, that won’t be a problem at all. But, if you’re hoping to give your character certain vibes, you’ll want to find out how their version of “You have my word” would be. Slangs are amongst the hardest to translate when you want to maintain your characters style and characteristics.
Okay so, well my game isn’t about a story, there’s no dialogues.
Perfectly fine, let’s go to your game menu now, the first thing your players will see when they join (assuming you have a menu) and translate “Play”.
I’m going to be a bit picky on this translation. The Chinese translation is completely correct. However it is acceptable for English native speakers to interpret “play” as “Begin game”. Whilst in Chinese, we don’t interpret it anything near to “Begin game” as that requires the word “Begin; 开始”.
We just see a plain “play”.
And pretend you’re going to make up some names for your items in the game.
“The Obsidian Sword of Wizard Valley”…
It missed the preposition “if”. Causing it to somewhat be, grammatically incorrect.
And names of characters… wow… that’s an entire different story… I’ll cover that near the end of the topic after we review some translators.
Google translate is doing a decent job. However if your best choice of translators are so much more… the following recommendations of translators are in no particular order.
1. YouDao
YouDao translate is a phone app and website. Using the same example phrase “You have my word” is translated perfectly.
They also provide you with example phases to better understand the English meaning.
This app is relatively popular, the first choice by many students and learners alike, simply because it’s convenient, fast, free and accurate.
There is a community section where people who can speak English well will share their tips and tricks to English speaking.
2. Baidu Translate
Baidu is one of the most popular search engine in China. And the translate is certainly just as accurate.
Compared to YouDao, Baidu Translate supports more pronunciations, people can listen how other real people pronounce them (in English). Chinese pronunciations on the other hand may sometimes sound robotic.
Tencent Translate
Just another great translator choice for you to try out as well. However I don’t often use this one myself. The first two recommendations should be enough for your usage and range of vocabulary.
These three machine translators are worth your time to explore and translate. There’s obviously many more,
Bing Translate
Sugou Translate
etc.
Machines so far can interpret human emotions, whatever feeling you’re hoping to give to the players might be lost in translation. Different Chinese characters could have different meanings.
“乐“ in Chinese has two pronunciations, one is “Lè” which you can understand as “Giggle, Happy”, the other is “yuè” which can be interpreted as “Tune, Music”.
In Chinese there is a name called "乐乐“ pronounced as “LèLè”, native Chinese speakers will know which is the correct one because… well… if you had to choose between “Giggles” or “MusicMusic”, I think you’d know…
If you had a character called “Skar” (instead of the word “scar” to make it challenging for the translators). Let’s see how all the machine translators we’ve seen so far would translate it.
Tencent Translate
Okay, nice. Skar is transliterated into Chinese phonetically!
YouDao Translate
I’ve no idea what its trying to tell me.
Baidu Translate
No.
Google Translate
Also transliterated into Chinese phonetics.
And if it was me. I’d probably use Google’s and Tencent’s for this name. But if I didn’t I might’ve went with “撕卡尔” pronounced the same as Google’s and Tencent’s but “撕” means “rip” as in “rip the paper”. I think it adds something to the character, imagine Skar has an eyepatch or… a scar on his face…
Your best choice translation for your game would still have to be manual translation, or human translation. Give your ideas and context to the translator so they know what you’re tying to express, what you’re hoping the players can feel when playing your game. They’ll understand the best slangs to use, they’ll replace the jokes you make with something natives will understand.
This doesn’t apply to just Chinese-English translation, basically every language. You’re going to need a human to check if everything actually means what you want them to mean.
As for machine translators, it’s probably best to use their local translators instead. If you want, you’d like to translate to Japanese let’s say, why not try DeepL for that instead of Google and Baidu?
I hope I could help you in this article to recognize what you’ll need to do if you want to translate your games. Although we all don’t really want to spend money on something we think we can do ourselves, the most accurate translators are not machines, but human.
"Blind Translations" puts you at risk if you do not have a reliable source to check the accuracy of your translations. Amongst slangs, we may be trying to express something, however to machine translate it you may be out of luck. They do not know what you’re referring to or trying to express. Without proper context and full sentences your translation will run off text.
You are welcome to give constructive criticism and feedback in the comment. Language is what links the world, and it would certainly be amazing if everyone in the world can play together without a language barrier.
Edited: I have added another section to the risks of “blind translation”, I have not made it clear that using machine translators puts you in a risky situation if you do not revise, check and correct your translations.