Posted January 24, 2013
Hey guys, Lars here, I'm the lead developer for Defender's Quest.
Just so you know, we're currently working on the game's localization engine. It's been discussed in some other forum threads but it's an important topic so I thought I'd give it its own thread.
I'm a polyglot myself (English/Norwegian/Spanish) so I'd like to see this game translated into as many languages as possible. However, it's only possible for us to hire so many translators, and right now my business partners only want to go after the biggest markets, one at a time, and see how that goes before taking any further steps. This means the first language we target will be German, and if that does well we might consider moving into other markets like Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, etc.
However, there are many languages we likely will never be able to hire professional translators for, but we still want to serve these communities. So, we are opening up the game to fan translation.
Here's the relevant thread on our own forums with some instructions for those interested:
http://www.defendersquest.com/theforum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1234
(Please note we had to install a rather aggressive anti-spam guard on our forum, so you won't be able to post outgoing links, type in cyrillic, or use certain blacklisted words in your first few posts, but after that you should be able to act as normal.)
Basically, the latest test build of the game will (eventually) be able to dynamically load all of its text from translation files, so theoretically every language can have its own translation. A few caveats:
1) We're starting with extended latin character sets. I'm adding more characters as we find gaps, Friday's build should add support for Polish, Czech, and Cyrillic characters. I'll add Asian characters if/when someone wants to translate the game to one of those languages.
2) I'll need to check with my lawyer about how we can include fan translations in the official build. This will probably require fan translators to sign off on something giving us permission to use it.
3) There's bugs :) I'm active on our forums, so this will be a learning process as we work together to make this game available in as many languages as possible.
4) I'm adding support for translators to be able to tweak UI elements if/when text overflows boundaries or needs to be changed in size. This will be touch-and-go, but I'll try to stay on top of it.
5) I'm still in the process of separating out text. I think I've gotten about 90% of it, but there's still some work to do.
Just so you know, we're currently working on the game's localization engine. It's been discussed in some other forum threads but it's an important topic so I thought I'd give it its own thread.
I'm a polyglot myself (English/Norwegian/Spanish) so I'd like to see this game translated into as many languages as possible. However, it's only possible for us to hire so many translators, and right now my business partners only want to go after the biggest markets, one at a time, and see how that goes before taking any further steps. This means the first language we target will be German, and if that does well we might consider moving into other markets like Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, etc.
However, there are many languages we likely will never be able to hire professional translators for, but we still want to serve these communities. So, we are opening up the game to fan translation.
Here's the relevant thread on our own forums with some instructions for those interested:
http://www.defendersquest.com/theforum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1234
(Please note we had to install a rather aggressive anti-spam guard on our forum, so you won't be able to post outgoing links, type in cyrillic, or use certain blacklisted words in your first few posts, but after that you should be able to act as normal.)
Basically, the latest test build of the game will (eventually) be able to dynamically load all of its text from translation files, so theoretically every language can have its own translation. A few caveats:
1) We're starting with extended latin character sets. I'm adding more characters as we find gaps, Friday's build should add support for Polish, Czech, and Cyrillic characters. I'll add Asian characters if/when someone wants to translate the game to one of those languages.
2) I'll need to check with my lawyer about how we can include fan translations in the official build. This will probably require fan translators to sign off on something giving us permission to use it.
3) There's bugs :) I'm active on our forums, so this will be a learning process as we work together to make this game available in as many languages as possible.
4) I'm adding support for translators to be able to tweak UI elements if/when text overflows boundaries or needs to be changed in size. This will be touch-and-go, but I'll try to stay on top of it.
5) I'm still in the process of separating out text. I think I've gotten about 90% of it, but there's still some work to do.
Post edited January 24, 2013 by larsiusprime
