
Localizing Papers, Please - baxter
http://dukope.tumblr.com/post/83177288060/localizing-papers-please-papers-please-was
======
danso
In case you don't see the link, Pope created a web interface, hosted on Github
Pages, that allows users to easily do the localization, collaborate via Github
forks, and import/export their work via CSV:

[http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/](http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/)

Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's
an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also
know how to whip up a useful, well-designed web-app for the purposes of
supporting his game like this.

~~~
616c
It is always interesting to see people use CSV in place of the established
file format for translations, POT files. There are logic for certain
grammatical elements (IIRC, it has been a while) and other edge cases that are
exactly why one avoids homegrown CSV in the first place.

Then again, even Papers Please is making common mistakes. I can count on a
single finger the number of i18n jobs I have seen. One in many years of
looking at IT jobs. This stuff is little understood, and very little demand.
But he makes of pointing out how this will causes problems.

I would love to see this game in Arabic, for example. Number in Arabic is
crazy complicated, and as a guy who translated software for FOSS
(arabeyes.org) there is a reason I bring up the number logic (1, dual, 3-99,
1000+ dictate different noun classes) and POT handles that. This and many
other issues indicate why no one can be bothered to handle this until much
later, and then it is such a pain in the ass with non-English charsets.

Not that this issue has come up a lot on HN recently. I am glad people are
showing this stuff with interest. Regardless of my opinion, this is very cool
work and I am glad to see developers caring again.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That was my reaction as well: why not gettext? ngettext and other facilities
are wildly useful, and there are a huge number of tools out there designed to
make it easy for translators to maintain translations.

~~~
eropple
gettext is more of a pain than you'd think unless you're in C or a C-with-a-
hat-on-it like PHP. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread I settled on Excel
XML files because gettext (which I of course looked at first) wasn't a
worthwhile format for either Java or .NET. And given that Papers Please is (I
think) written in HaXe, I don't know what the story for gettext support is
there.

That's without getting into licensing headaches, which is why the idea of
P/Invoking GNU gettext is a straight-up nopenopenope.

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brianmcconnell
Localization professional and developer here. I'd recommend taking a look at
Transifex. This is a well thought out tool for managing localization projects
and assets (prompt catalogs, resx files, etc), and for managing the
translation process (it supports machine, crowd and professional translation,
so you can optimize for cost and quality).

They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translating
web content super easy. You just embed some JS in your template, and it re-
writes the pages in translation when needed. Way way easier than, for example,
setting up a multilingual Drupal site, and in most cases, will get the job
done nicely.

My $0.02

~~~
herbertjacu
"My $0.02"

Why do people feel the need to write this after their posts? Were you afraid
it would not be clear that it was an opinion? What purpose does it serve? Why
did you go to such length to write it as "My $0.02" rather than "My two
cents", or just "My 2c"?

It seems to be some kind of "thing" that people do here. Is it an in-joke?

~~~
gambiting
I think you take it way too seriously. Relax.

~~~
herbertjacu
I'm not angry about it or anything.

I just don't get it - is it supposed to be a joke?

~~~
deaconblues
'My $0.02' \- For when 'IMHO' isn't enough.

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Cyph0n
Very interesting article. I can't how imagine how difficult it must have been
to support localization after the game was released.

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DrTung
Very minor complaint but first of January 1984 is always depicted as
'1984.01.01' in the game, regardless of I18N selected. While this is good in
Germany, it many countries like US you instead prefer something like '1/1/84'.

~~~
daurnimator
Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1179/](https://xkcd.com/1179/)

~~~
DrTung
Being Swedish I totally agree with XKCD since that's how dates are written
here since the 70's. But this standard seems to be receding, for example
recently the Swedish DMV had to change so that on new driver's licenses the
date is written '01.01.1984' instead of previously '1984-01-01' :-( because of
EU parliament rules.

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aeontech
Very interesting writeup, thank you!

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ekianjo
In his second part of his article, he says...

> There’s a system for making people sound generally non-Japanese (using lots
> of katakana and dropping prepositions), but it’s tiring to read and has an
> air of childishness, since this is one of the first scripts kids learn to
> read/write in Japan

This is utterly wrong. Katakana usage in Japanese has nothing childish
attached to it. If at all, Hiragana would be the one which is considered the
more "childish" way of writing, but there are numerous imported words (and
more and more, I'd say) using Katakana even in business context - and
certainly taken very seriously.

If you don't know a language, don't make assumptions on it. By the way the
french translation of "Your son is dead" as "Votre fils est mort" is very dry
and tasteless, the proper way or saying it in french is "votre fils est
decede". I hate it when people do a literate translation from English to
French, many words are similar but they are not used at all in the same
situations.

~~~
icelancer
> I hate it when people do a literate translation from English to French, many
> words are similar but they are not used at all in the same situations.

Yes, this is why most people generally hate doing translations in general -
people like you who nitpick.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Yes, this is why most people generally hate doing translations in general -
> people like you who nitpick._

I don't know a bit of French, or Japanese. But I do know that there are a
awful lot of English translations, done by well-meaning people, which vary
from mediocre to Godawful. Almost every anime subtitling job I've ever seen is
at the very least somewhat stilted and awkward to my ear. (Though they're
still better than the dubs.) And a lot of it comes down to native English
speakers who fear losing the intended nuances of the original and so do a
rigidly literal translation, because they think that's the "most accurate."

So the problem isn't nitpicking; it's the _wrong kind_ of nitpicking. If you
think you can do a translation by following a rulebook and wave off dissenters
as "nitpickers," you are probably going to do a shitty job, and have no idea
why.

~~~
ekianjo
> And a lot of it comes down to native English speakers who fear losing the
> intended nuances of the original and so do a rigidly literal translation,
> because they think that's the "most accurate."

Agree with you.

One of the key issues is that, to be a good translator you need to have a good
command of BOTH languages. I can tell you I see piss poor French translations
(from English or other languages) every day as well, and it's not nitpicking,
it's just people doing an awful job at what they are being paid for. Most
people who do translations are barely even literate in their own language in
the first place (you can see that in their obvious lack of vocabulary).

On the other hand, I'd say the best translations I have seen go way beyond the
original work, making the translated work even better, more rich, more nuanced
than what it was before. It's not just "translation", it's rather close to
versioning.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Oh, yes, absolutely.

Maddeningly, whenever that happens with e.g. anime you immediately get swarms
of furious fans decrying the translation for "inaccuracy."

~~~
ekianjo
I can't say I have seen that in anime myself, but there's a couple of movies
where the translation/version was actually better than the original movie in
terms of language, figures of speech and so on. It was not just translation,
it was beautiful writing.

