Large translation project

[Radiant]

I'm curious. Suppose I have a large "full-length" adventure game project, say A Tale Of Two Kingdoms, and I would like this translated into German/French/Spanish. Is there some place I could look for translators? This is basically asking people to translate a full novel, so just dropping it on the "request service" forum here doesn't seem like the best approach. Is there something like a community of translators that people have good experience with?

[Stupot]

You could try looking at Gengo.com . You upload the files onto the site and then their translators can tackle it... The beauty of that is you could upload it in chunks of several smaller jobs and have several people working on different parts of the text.... The downside of that is lack of consistency.  I'm not familiar with how things work from a customer point of view (eg. pricing) but I use the site as a translator of small japanese jobs, and they do try to take quality very seriously.   It must be worth checking out.

[FlyingMandarine]

I would say there are three "viable" ways of doing that kind of translation:

-Using a cheap translation website; Stupot+ suggests Gengo.com, which I only know by name, but I, for one, have worked for OneHourTranslation.com for a few years. I would, however, strongly suggest against posting different small projects instead of the whole game script as a whole; the lack of consistency you will definitely experience in your translation is not worth it (it would only allow you to get your translation done sooner, which would only be interesting if you need a job done urgently).
These translation services are cheap indeed, but the quality is very hit-or-miss, and your translators will not test the game to make adjustments in the translation. Small mobile games that don't rely too much on text often have their translations done by that kind of website.

-Using a high-quality translation website specialized in video gaming: Keywords International is one of them (they translated Halo, Fable, Assassin's Creed...). The quality will definitely be there, because I believe they do test their translations in-game to make sure everything is perfect. However, if they accept to translate your game, it will be rather expensive. I've worked for them for a short time, and they seemed very professional.

-Surfing the Web for professional translators specialized in video game localization (maybe you could indeed ask in the request service forum here; I'm sure there are professional translators within the AGS community; I'm a professional English-to-French translator, so feel free to PM me if you're interested), and pick one for each language. You have to carefully choose who you work with, which might take a bit of time, but once you've got someone that does a great job on your game, you will know who to go to if you want your next game translated. It should also be less expensive than Keywords International (but quite a bit more than Gengo/OHT).

I would definitely choose that third option for my game. And although I could consider the first option for a book, doing such a thing for a video game seems suicidal to me because of the lack of context usually found in video game scripts.

Good luck!

[Radiant]

That's useful advice. However, a limiting factor is that our games are freeware, which means that this is not a paid job for the translator either.

[Adeel]

IIRC, there's a guy from French AGS forums. If he likes someone's game, he offers to translate their game in French (in the comments' section). Maybe he'll do your job for free.

[FlyingMandarine]

That's useful advice. However, a limiting factor is that our games are freeware, which means that this is not a paid job for the translator either.

My bad! I knew your past games were freeware, but I thought you asked for a potential future commercial game or for a paid special edition of your already existing free games.

If the translator isn't paid, then I don't see why you wouldn't consider posting in the Recruitment forum; I'm sure you'll have at least a few answers from people that are willing to get some localization experience by translating games, or simply from people who want to help. But then, you would probably need to recruit at least one proofreader for each language too just in case the translation ends up amateurish.
And if nobody serious answers, well... at least you tried!

[Snarky]

You could Kickstart it.

No, seriously, you could do that. You just said that there's nothing for you to spend KS cash on, but this would be an obvious example of how to put the money to good use. (It would just be donations, of course, plus whatever exclusives you could come up with - signed digital drawing or whatever, as the finished translations would, I expect, also be freeware.)

[Babar]

Would probably be difficult to drum up kickstarter interest for translations of a game from several years ago, no? I mean, your focus would be people from these countries who know enough english to know about the game, but not enough to play it. You'd probably have to have a kickstarter video in several languages .
Unless, of course, you actually have some physical or digital memorabilia that would interest a fan who has played it, even if they don't particularly care if a translation gets made.