I'm just wondering how other people would deal with having a playerbase from different parts of the world, groups of which speak different languages.
How do other people deal with language barriers in their games and communities? How do you think that affects your game commmunity as a whole? Does anyone have any ideas for things we as developers can do to make communication easier?
To use an example, in Hazordhu II there was a time when there were players from brazil, central america, and north america all playing at the same time. The language barrier became a problem in both out of character global chat, and especially in the In Character chat. Eventually what we (the english speaking members of the community) did was tried our best to deal with the language barrier OOC, and IC we decided as a community to assume they were foreigners from a far off land.
I think overall this was to the detriment of the non-english speaking players, as I feel (from what I gathered from google translate) they felt ostracized from the community as a whole. There were several misunderstandings where players would be fighting simply because a portuguese speaking player didn't understand the explanation of controls. This would usually lead to a server mod dealing with them with no special care to the situation, ie: removal of combat capabilities, when really it was an honest mistake for an honest reason.
Some ideas I would like to see implemented in games that garner an audience like this would be to have different languages available in the programmed content (translations of things like tooltips, tutorials, developer-written content). I do suppose that depends on the ability of the devs to read/write in another language, or track down someone who can. Perhaps another thought would be to somehow tie google translate into their game to translate text on the fly. I don't know if that's even possible, but it would be pretty nifty to see. Lastly I think that special care is a no-brainer when it comes to foreign players. The language barrier can be a major hinderance to them and they can find it frustrating a lot of the time. Could you imagine playing a game in which all the dialogue and text was dutch, only to be banned because you didn't understand what you were actually doing? T'would suck.
So yeah, what are your thoughts on the matter?
ID:1846463
 May 6 2015, 6:06 am
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Most game companies just make the game with multiple languages. Some even go as far as hiring different voice actors for each language, but this can be costly. Indie developers don't tend to make games with translated text, but it is becoming more popular for example Minecraft.
As for implementing a program that does translation for you.. That seems like it would be taxing on the chat system and there is no 100% non-error translation system, some things simply can't be translated into another language. I agree it would be cool though. I have played my fair share of Korean games and I don't speak or read any Korean. When you go onto the game you have to already know that there is going to be challenges with language. Now when talking about being banned or punished for not being able to understand rules isn't really the responsibility of the developer/mod of the game. Not knowing the rules is never an excuse sadly. Forget about it being a game, if you don't know the rules to a place where you cannot communicate, there is going to be trouble. Translating tooltips/items/names objects like those are your best bet. As for interection between players.. you can't fix that. | |
What some games do is they'll have a limited chat element with prepackaged messages. For Monster Hunter you'll have the usual sayings along with more specific ones like, "I'm gonna trap it," which are easy to tap and send in the middle of a fight. There are also messages which are sent out automatically, like when you're stunned and need help or when you mount a monster.
What you could do is build up a phrase list for your own game, a list of common phrases players need to communicate ideas related to game mechanics. You could also take a page from Dark Souls and have message combinations. eg: "I need to buy an" "apple." Add a setting for players to automatically translate incoming messages in other languages and have your game do the rest. They won't exactly be chatting in different languages, but they will be able to effectively communicate game-related concepts. For a smaller scale project like Hazordhu II, I think this would be the most effective method of dealing with the issue of language barriers between players. | |
From a community standpoint, I've staffed a handful of servers that play various games with international communities. Most of the time hosts specify that it's an English-primary server; this is especially important on roleplaying servers, where the vast majority of communication is intended to build a story with other participants.
On servers where English wasn't a requirement, we either promoted staff who were bilingual or recognized community members who were available to translate when needed. That helped immensely, particularly when either answering pages or attempting to settle disputes between players. From an engineering standpoint, ideally you allow players to select a language/locale when initially starting the game and then map out the appropriate strings. This could be for things like tooltips or tutorials, as well as for emoting and basic forms of communication (as another person pointed out -- that's a great idea!). I wouldn't rely on websites to make the translations for you. If a developer is really invested into making a product that can be marketed in multiple locales, she really should take the time to find native speakers and bring them on board to assist with the translation services. Ideally you're paying them for their efforts (I'm a big fan of monetary compensation for contributions/services, but I recognize, too, that not everyone is capable of that), but I'm certain that you could also provide in-game benefits as well. Keep in mind that you'd need to consider RTL support for specific languages. These would include Urdu, Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. A lot of modern East Asian languages are now LTR, so you won't have too many concerns there. Your UI should be structured in a way that you can easily swap the direction of the language and, if needed, the entire interface in order to facilitate a better user experience. | |
If I were to branch to different languages, I would just translate the text in the game to different languages via Google Translate because I'm lazy.
Majority of games on BYOND just don't offer any multilanguage support. Rules are listed in a lot of games for "English in OOC" and whatnot. Although, I do see a lot of Brazilian-specific Bleach/Naruto games.
I guess if you really wanted to put the hard work into it, you could grab the output of players and run it through a translator and then bring it back into the server for hosted games. This would be broken translation as many translation sites don't account for slang or loose languages.
Something that is RolePlay specific would be difficult to control with other languages. Something that's more geared towards no-RP, I find, wouldn't really be as much bothersome, although sometimes bothersome at times.
On such small scale games like these on BYOND it's really hard to just let it and develop on it's own. The only real exception I see is SS13 has a large player base in and out of BYOND which has opened it's community up to a variety of different languages and language-specific servers, and not only because it's open-source but the palyers have form a mass and worked together towards translating. I remember browsing through the other day trying to find news on the standalone SS13 and found a couple different Spanish and a Dutch community specifically for SS13. From playing the various different distributions of SS13 it's clear that none of them had a built-in translator so best guess is the, for example, Spanish speakers started to group together and branched off into their own community.
I think you could work something with Topic() for Google Translate or some form of HTML voodoo.
Pretty much the same thoughts. I've looked into it a lot of years back but really didn't get around to doing anything. I did try to translate a lot of a game's text into Spanish and French (at the time I was learning French in high school so I figured it would be practice).
If you could client-side translate text on the fly, that would be ideal. Otherwise copy+paste every text string into Google Translate and a multitude of vars and list combinations could suffice and then have the player base itself assist with fixing anything wrong in the output translation. I think most people just try to deal with English to X and X to English, but there's the times where you have a variety of different languages on one server so you'll need to accompany English to X and Y and Z, Z to X, Y to X, Y to Z, etc. etc.
In a nutshell, in small-scale games I find it's really up to the developer to branch to other languages if they translate. In large-scale games, normally the player-base themselves will translate as they need if their motivated enough.
/edit/ When I was looking into it years ago, I was trying to form some sort of telnet-based automatic server bot that would output the original text, and then a new output in italics specifically geared towards what language the /client itself was set to. This turned out to be more of a headache itself for such a small project anyways, so I dumped the ideal.