One of the most pressing issues for a solo developer is the language barrier. It’s undeniable that everyone prefers a video game translated into their native language. You can speak all the foreign languages you want, but your own will always hold a special place. Moreover, it seems that the algorithms used by stores to present new titles to individual players factor in the language, among other parameters, to determine if a game is a good match for a player. In other words, if you translate your game into Japanese, Japanese players will likely see the advertisement, but Indian players probably won’t.
Translating a video game is not a task that can be easily handled with just a dictionary. There’s an English expression I absolutely love, especially since I have pets: “It rains cats and dogs!” It means it’s raining heavily. Literally translated into Italian, it would be “Piovono cani e gatti!” The problem is, this idiom isn’t used in Italian. Unless someone has studied English and can make the connection, Italians would say something more like “Piove a secchiate,” which roughly translates to “It rains buckets of water.” Literal translation just doesn’t work in this case.
This is where AI comes into play—a valuable tool that simplifies many tasks, but one that is also shaped by its… “culture.” An AI is essentially a computer system, an aggregator of information that works on statistical foundations. More than being “intelligent,” it’s really a great investigator. The issue is that when an AI is trained superficially for a task, it can fail miserably. Most AIs today can handle languages like English very well, likely the most common for such purposes, and probably other Western languages, simply because the West is at the forefront of AI development. But let’s talk about Chinese for a moment. How would you manage with Mandarin, which probably looks like a cryptographic code to you?
AI can make huge mistakes. At the very least, you should be able to “verify” the work the AI has done afterward, ensuring you don’t publish something problematic. And that alone requires at least a decent understanding of the target language. Meanwhile, the AI might even teach you something new! If you understand the general meaning of the text, you could likely get by with the help of a dictionary, maybe even adding new words to your personal vocabulary in the process. But when it comes to a language you’re completely unfamiliar with, using an unknown writing system, you can only trust the results. Trust is good, but double-checking is better, as the old saying goes.
An alternative to using AI is to hire a professional. However, there’s more bad news on this front: translating a single word can cost around $0.10. It seems small, but if you’ve developed a visual novel or an RPG with complex dialogues, you’ll soon feel the strain on your wallet.
This explains why most indie games are published in one or two languages at most. One is almost certainly English, a language widely spoken in the Western world, but also the “lingua franca” of IT, which any programmer must know to read manuals. The other language? It’s simply the developer’s native tongue.
Some developers have turned to their community to translate their games into various languages. In principle, this method isn’t much more effective than using AI, because, until proven otherwise, a Chinese player could troll you by filling your game with swear words, and you wouldn’t even know. Of course, as with Wikipedia, the community would step in to fix it, but we’re talking about a large number of people. In other words, and ironically, this method only works if your game has gained a certain level of popularity, at which point either you would have enough money to pay a professional, or… people do love free games.
From my perspective, a bilingual approach that gradually expands as new revenue comes in might be a suitable solution for an indie developer. The problem is that, by doing so, you might end up spending earnings from previous sales, only to discover too late that those were the only ones.
Top image by Tumisu from Pixabay