French, Spanish and Arabic speakers (German later
Community Forums/General Help/French, Spanish and Arabic speakers (German later
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| Can you read my store listing on the google play play store for Star Dancer Lite and let me know the quality of the translation. Ive tested converting back to english via google play and it seems okay. Link is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lloydm.geoswordlite (Edit...comment boy i hate the delete key on text fields in my phone on long urls....) |
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| I could check "German" once you added it. A "translating back a google translation"-action is no valid check. If you think "1 + 5 = 9" then obviously "9 - 5 = 1" for you :-) bye Ron |
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| I fully understand that Derron. But i can at least take the translations i was sold and get an idea if they sound reasonable in english hence are probably not too shabby. |
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| German one will be here (see link below) in several hours (takes an hour or two for the changes on the playstore to go through...so it is currently about 8am Greenwich Mean Time by my reckoning so by about 10am GMT it should be available) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lloydm.geoswordlite&hl=de (note for some reason the German one they did not translate the title....I'm okay with that but it seems a little strange to me that they didn't do that...I also had to alter the Spanish short description myself since they made it too many characters for the short description field!) |
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| At the time as I had a look at it, it was not translated - now it is. There are some phrases which sound a bit "stilted". Also there is the German "Sie" and "Du" (in English both are called "you") ... "Sie" is used if you are talking to your boss or to stay "formal". For your family and buddies you will use "Du". Which one do you prefer? The "buddy-esk" one or the formal one? Same then applies for the words and style of the phrases. More formal - or mor "catchy" ? In the likes of "You can choose between 5 different weapons" vs "Choose between 5 different weapons" Samples of an incorrect translation: let's play (full version) - "Spielen wir! (Vollversion)" "Spielen wir!" sounds as bad as "play we!" (Germanspeaking players will most likely know "let's plays"). bye Ron |
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| It's like being back at school :-p |
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| Thanks Derron...I suppose that is not too bad then...but there's not a huge amount I can do about the quality of the translations - nice to know that it is not simply an electronic tranlsation that I've paid for. Re: formal/informal - as Brucey says it's like being back at school - some languages want the formal some don't - if that is the main worst area of the translation I'm not too worried. Thanks though. |
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| but there's not a huge amount I can do about the quality of the translations How's that? Presumably if you get an actual person to translate then you will get exactly what you want? |
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| Yes that would normally be the case Brucey but i've paid a service through google and there doesn't seem to be anyway to contact them - it is all done via referrals, through referrals, through 'partner programs' and so on that google has that make it next to impossible to even know who the translator is! |
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| acceptable arabic translation :) |
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| Thanks azrak. |
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| The German translation is done by someone who is not into "gaming". Eg. "Balancing" is used by German players - instead of (one of the possible) translation "Gleichgewicht" (like in "equilibrium"). Dunno how to translate "dogfight" though... because it translates to "Luftkampf" (fight in the _air_) - which is not true ;-). The used translation is btw "Luftkampf" :-) Also "Upgrade to the full version" is translated to "Aktualisieren sie auf die Vollversion" (which equals to "_update_ to the full version"). That phrase is not 1:1 translatable, it should be more a "Buy the full version to enable access to ...". All in all it is a straight translation of what you have written in English. There is no matching of "style" people expect for gaming descriptions. To be honest: Neither the English, nor the German translation are crying for attention, they are very "formal". I would more expect a "carnival barker"-style (not totally, but every now and then - just to catch the attention of the potential reader). If this is not what you want, the translation is good enough for non-native German speakers, all others will surely feel a bit alienated by the formal text and some stilted phrased. -> the translation was done by a non-native (German) speaker or by a native speaker in a bad mood, just translating phrase by phrase without thinking about the "style"/"sound of a phrase". Do not see above as "critics and no good word regards the effort" - but as soon as you pay for something, _I_ expect the product to _not_ contain flaws. Expect from others, what you expect from yourself. bye Ron |
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| The German translation is done by someone who is not into "gaming". That was obvious from your original post. Surely there are better services available for these kinds of things? Context always plays an important in these things, and can require a completely different translation depending on it. |
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| Thanks again. It's very hard to gauge the quality of a translation without being a native speaker. Hence why i ask you guys. Im glad you pointed it out though. It's difficult to know if i can actually get anything done about it by the company who did it since im pretty certain like with a lot of google provided services there is very little recourse for action if you are unhappy with a service....layer after layer of automated responses. I'm hesitant to spend further on it but id potentially be prepared to pay someone like yourself to correct or improve the translation. Still, translation is one of those things where the buyer has to trust the provider to do a good job because as in my case i cannot verify the quality on my own. |
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| In the french translation : Système de comportementale de l'IA en vol pondéré I don't understand what you're talking about but whatever, there is a mistake "Système comportemental de l'IA" (but this definitely doesn't sound good) better suggestion : "Système de comportement de l'IA" And later, you've got two times the same text Remarque - les futures mises à jour de ce jeu peuvent inclure des modifications de l'expérience concernant l'équilibre. [...] Remarque - les futures mises à jour de ce jeu peuvent inclure des modifications de l'expérience concernant l'équilibre et d'autres caractéristiques. Else, I don't see errors (but, I'm not a grammair teacher ... I may have missed some) but the overall expression is probably a bit too technical (in my opinion) Configurez le comportement en vol de l'IA avec un système de poids unique et regarder vos vaisseaux s'affronter parmi les étoiles. texto, this would be in english : "Setup IA's inflight behaviours with a unique weight system and watch your ships fighting among the stars" There is no mistake here but ... it does mean something and at the same time ... it doesn't "really" mean anything, at least for a simple gamer. As programmer I don't even see what you're talking about ... but I suppose it's about a technical aspect of the way you coded the programmable IA's behaviour. I can't really imagine a simple player understanding what you wanted to say with "the weight system". Hope it helped. ps : localization on the playstore is maybe not that important, players almost never read the descriptions and skip the download if the pictures does not seem attractive. And, to be true, most chinese games have a freaking french translation (in game -_-) that french people are assuming to accept if the game is good enough. So, sometimes, the translation can be done later, by the community around the game itself. (they often offer to translate for free just to say "Hey ! asshole, it's not how we say that !" ... haters can be usefull sometimes :D) [edit] Oh, sorry, I totally forgot this one Jouons (version complète) Seriously, there is absolutely nobody in France that say "Jouons" for this kind of video. We all say "Let's Play" as Germans do or "playthrough" which is also an English word which is "internationalised" whatever the country. Regarding the translation, I might only suppose the translater is : - not a gamer (At all !) - or is not French - is a robot ? |
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| @Brucey Yepp, I repeated myself a bit to make it even more "emphasized" :-) I am "d'accord" with Bobysait about the importance of the playstore description ;-) May I ask what you had to pay for the translation, I assume you pay "per thousand words" or "per phrase" or so. Regarding user translation: I got some texts translated for my game but even then we had to correct texts. We had a Turkish gamer with an academical degree - but still there were grammar errors and "straight translations" (albeit he knew what the content of the text was). I by luck had one member on my forum knowing a German-Turkish female ... and she corrected it then. What I want to express is, that you wont get a perfect translation by just "one iteration" of a translation process. And in _no_ way it gets perfect without direct communication ("is this what you meant?"). Another - even more - important aspect is that the source text (your English one) needs to already be "matured" (fit to your target audience, stylized, grammar checked ...). Good luck with the sales. bye Ron |
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| Each translation was about 40 USD ... and I'm increasingly less pleased with their output the more i read your comments. At the same time a local melbourne based service i looked at cost about 5x as much and probably would have been much better. Yet this was a service google recommended through their play store developer console hence i assumed they'd be more in tune with gaming. Apparently that's not the case. |
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| You gets what you pays for :-) |
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