Translation Topple

If you’d like to help with translating Totem Topple, you can do so here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16L93VAZys5cdselM08FRpWKwJoZsXb62kiMlBCRoO4Q/edit#gid=0

Totem Topple is the first game where we’ve gone beyond English and translated the game into different languages. It’s always great for people to be able to enjoy games in their native language. All too often, there’s a touch of cultural arrogance from English speaking developers in assuming that the rest of the world will just deal with the fact the game is in one language only, so it’s nice to break that for once.

Voice and text can add a huge amount to the playing experience, but for those games that don’t have a narrative focus (or maybe even some that do!) it’s often a good idea to design out unnecessary text and voice acting to save cost and effort when translating.

For Totem Topple, voice acting is way outside our budget anyway, and we’ve very much aimed to reduce the amount of text we use. However, in compiling a list of all the words and phrases in the game, we were actually surprised by just how much there was!

A lot of the text does not in fact come from the game itself, but rather from things related to the game. Store descriptions and legal notices in the Wii U e-manual in particular have caught us out. It’s easy to add in a few lines of cool sounding description to entice players to buy and download, but that all needs translating if the game isn’t going to look odd and out of place with its English descriptions in amongst everything else in another language. Not to mention putting people off who maybe don’t immediately get the game from the screenshots or box art and then can’t work out what the game is actually about.

The good news is that it’s been technically easy to put the translations in so far. Whilst not perfect, it’s been relatively untroubbling to put in the code that lets us detect different languages and swap out text appropriately. We’ll probably come up against some problems when it comes to German, with its famously long words, and we’ve yet to try out a system for languages written from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. The hope is though, that we can adapt the game as we go along / as we add more languages in the future.

As for sourcing all those different languages, it’s been bitty to say the least. Excited by the prospect of getting fans to help translate the game, and on hearing other devs have good experiences, we’ve posted out the call on twitter and facebook to help. However, there is a lot of text, and some of it is especially dense (the store descriptions) or boring (the e-manual notices about COPPA compliance and privacy policies). Since we’ve been asking people to help us for free, it’s only understandable that they can only give so much time and effort before it loses the fun and starts to feel rather like work. Equally, when we’ve asked friends and family, we’ve tried to use them more for proof-reading and double checking translations from elsewhere (though for one friend, corrections and edits turned out to be rather more work than either of us was expecting!)

Missing some accents?

We’ve also tried using resources like Polyglot, which whilst useful, will only get you so far before specialist or theme specific words start to crop up. How many games are there where “Demon spirit enemies are trying to knock your totem pole down”? (I don’t know, but betting Totem Topple is amongst the best of them!)

We’ve also used semi-professional translators from sites like fiverr.com, though it’s always difficult to know just what the quality of the translation is like. Many of those on the site are not individuals but collectives who farm work out, so no guarantee you’ll even get the same person translating next time. It’s cheap, but their work reflects on us, so we have to be very careful.

One area where we’ve tried to go the extra mile is with regional variations. Unlike English, which doesn’t really have dialects and is generally fairly uniform in its grammar and spelling, other languages can vary greatly depending on where or by whom they are spoken. In particular, Spanish of Latin America can be markedly different from that used in Spain itself, so our initial release will in fact have Mexican Spanish for North and Latin America, and European Spanish for European version.

What we haven’t done is fully localise the game for specific target markets. Mostly because we feel there isn’t much that we could change beyond superficial stuff like red colour used to mean good things, rather than bad things in China. (We’ve actually tried to avoid using red/green anyway because it’s an issue for many colour blind people).

With any luck though, we can reach the most people possible and through translating the game, bring smiles to the faces of those who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the game.