Localization

[x4000]

Wow, localization takes forever.  And I'm not actually doing the translating, I'm just converting all of the compiled-in text from AI War into a localization-friendly format for later translation.  I can't say too much right now, but there's a strong chance that AI War will be coming to retail in a number of countries by the end of the year, so the localization project is really important in the short term to keep that on schedule.

Anyway, so that's where I'm at -- this week will be lighter overall on the prerelease content because of it, though there are some very cool things in store (three new ships among them, plus a lot of the fixes, smaller requests, etc, from you guys).  That's the reason you're not seeing the usual daily prereleases at the moment, anyhow.

[CautiousChaos]

Localisation.   

[x4000]

Only in Britain.   Or, perhaps, only not in the US.

[Fiskbit]

The 's' is for 'unAmerican.'

Or maybe that's the mystery 'u' in 'colour'...

[x4000]

Actually, I'm quite fond of those extra u's.  In high school I went through a rebellious phase where I spelled everything the British way, but that kept getting marked wrong by a couple of English teachers of mine.  But even then I didn't give up my z's.

[darke]

This is why they're normally referred to as L10n and i18n.

[Revenantus]

Indeed, I'll be much happier with my Armour Ships. I'm sure you'll honour all the other necessary changes to the dialogue. It'll save me having to memorise all these American spellings.

Remember, place structures at the centre of forcefields for defence. Maybe I'll start an encyclopaedia of such manoeuvres.

I actually swap between Mutilated American English and Proper British English a lot when I'm online, probably a habit to get out of.

[Fiskbit]

I prefer theatre to theater, myself, but that's the only strange foreign word I import, I swear.

[x4000]

Haha.  I won't be doing the translation myself -- I don't know if the distributors in Britain would de-Americanize the spellings or not.  I look forward to seeing how words like "EtherJet" and "Attritioner" are translated to German, though.  There are probably some other really funny ones.

[eRe4s3r]

Ätherjet and Zermürber  

Don't forget that you need to support Ä Ü etc. ;p

I wouldn't count on a publisher to do decent localization though (and also, it IS locali[z]ation)

Non native Publishers are notoriously bad to choose a decent "means the same, is not the same" translation for non-english languages

[CautiousChaos]

Haha.  I won't be doing the translation myself -- I don't know if the distributors in Britain would de-Americanize the spellings or not.  I look forward to seeing how words like "EtherJet" and "Attritioner" are translated to German, though.  There are probably some other really funny ones.

Having gone through the process of localizing a few products I can say that non-dictionary or proprietary words like Etherjet usually remain in that spelling regardless of language.  A word like attritioner, with a root of attrition, might be loosely translated into a German analog; just depends a bit on the translator.  It gets really interesting when dealing with Asian/Middle Eastern languages, too.

-cc

[AcidWeb]

I can make you Polish translation if you are interested 

[x4000]

Ätherjet and Zermürber  

Ah, cool!

Don't forget that you need to support Ä Ü etc. ;p

It's unicode, so anything should work fine.  I'm not using an image set for text.

I wouldn't count on a publisher to do decent localization though (and also, it IS locali[z]ation)

Non native Publishers are notoriously bad to choose a decent "means the same, is not the same" translation for non-english languages

Well, this publisher is native German, so that should help.   And I think they they work with local distributors in each region to do a localization.  We shall see how that works out (not that I'll be able to really tell).

[x4000]

I can make you Polish translation if you are interested 

I may well take you up on that.

I'm not really sure yet how this is all going to play out, negotiations are still in progress so I cannot say too much.  But it has definitely crossed my mind to solicit AI War players whose native language is something other than English (non-native speakers, no matter how excellent -- my wife used to teach in French for instance -- simply would not have the nuances for some of the stranger words in my opinion).

Regardless of how it goes with the publisher and what territories they go for up front, I might still do something like that for the online version.  Of course, with weekly DLC updates and such for the online version, that could get challenging to maintain.  So there are still things like that being sorted out, too.

But thanks for the offer!  I am glad to know someone who speaks Polish, and who would be interested in this if it works out to have translations in the online version in that fashion.

[x4000]

Having gone through the process of localizing a few products I can say that non-dictionary or proprietary words like Etherjet usually remain in that spelling regardless of language.

Yeah, that's true with so many French words, too (all sorts of technology words).  Ether and Jet and such are just compound words, though, so I figured they might turn into something really different based on the translations of the individual parts.

It gets really interesting when dealing with Asian/Middle Eastern languages, too.

I bet!