UPDATE 9/28: Per the suggestion of one translator, the work is now billable by the word instead of by the hour, to simplify things.
UPDATE 11/9: Please see my post below, for the moment this is on hold. We are NOT looking for translators at the moment, but I really do appreciate all the kind offers that are flooding in. I'll keep people informed about how this changes, though.
Now that the localization programming work is done, we need someone to actually translate the game into German in particular, but also other languages. Native speakers are a must, because otherwise the nuances and so forth are just not going to come across right. Someone who is fairly knowledgeable about the game is also really preferred, because I think that will result in a better translation and less work on my part explaining what things mean.
This would be set up as a rate of $0.07 USD per word translated, payable via Paypal upon completion, and it would preferably be someone who is available to do some (paid) translation for each new official release as those come out. Currently there are 21,928 in-game words to translate for 2.0, which would be a fee of $1,534.96 USD for the initial project. For the in-game text in particular, there is a LOT of repetition of words and even whole sentences in the case of ships.xml and even some of the other files, so this should be easier than translating (say) a book, which has unique turns of phrase in every sentence, plus a lot of nuances of language that just aren't present in this sort of tooltip/instructional writing.
If you're interested in seeing what needs translating, take a look in the Language\en folder in the game directory. If you're interested in translating for French, German, Polish, or a few other Eastern European languages, please let me know via email (chrispark7 at gmail dot com) or via PM. Please let me know if you're available for doing the minor updates on an ongoing basis. German is my first priority by far, and will probably be the only project that actually happens before November at the earliest due to budget concerns.
As far as support goes in these other languages, I have no idea how I'm going to handle that. The manual (still upcoming) is also going to need to be translated at a minimum, along with the keyboard shortcuts document, but since that isn't yet complete I don't know how many words are going to be involved. I'm still trying to figure out the specifics of a lot of this localization stuff, but at least the programming part is done. Right now I'm just trying to find people who would be potentially interested in doing translations into these languages, and I'll need to set up the actual contracts and schedules later on down the line.
