A good translation of a game with only like 50 pages of text. They could bust out a passable translation within a week. How long would a great one take? Like two, three weeks to write?
As a translator, I wanna say that translation isn’t a simple conversion of words when it comes to story.
It takes longer than that to translate a good story of 50 pages because you have to make sure you understand the story and even the unwritten parts of it to convey the right nuance and tone.
My father used to translate books and managed about a page per hour with an editor to offer notes. I stand by 2-3 weeks to manually translate 50 pages of dialogue and exposition to a great, shippable quality. It’s more difficult when the subject matter is this disjointed, but I don’t imagine it would slow someone down by more than 4x. Particularly if there are notes on tone and premise available.
Maybe you were just talking about the story and perhaps you’re right. A whole team might be able to handle it with perfect editor’s notes and zero questions, zero changes.
But I would like to also add that Hollow Knight’s story is very cryptic and the lines by all the characters are very disjointed. It’s also a fantasy so there are a lot of made up names, terminologies, ideas, and play on words that simply may not exist in the target language.
I don’t know what genre or language pairs your father used to translate, but English to Chinese, I imagine, is quite difficult.
I read an article about the Japanese localization of the game and the translator did a lot of back and forth with the devs (not just an editor), to discuss the world and tone. It wasn’t just a matter of “we want it this way by this day,” and boom, it’s done.
Furthermore, you have to consider all the extra UI stuff they have to translate when it comes to video games.
So, while I respect your opinion, I too stand by mine that 2 - 3 weeks seems too short especially if we include the UI stuff as well as review/QA.
It could be that your father was just better than me at translating lol.
Edit: I’m also wondering if the PPC needs to review the content (not the quality) before it is approved for sale in China.
Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that’d be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?
A good translation of a game with only like 50 pages of text. They could bust out a passable translation within a week. How long would a great one take? Like two, three weeks to write?
As a translator, I wanna say that translation isn’t a simple conversion of words when it comes to story. It takes longer than that to translate a good story of 50 pages because you have to make sure you understand the story and even the unwritten parts of it to convey the right nuance and tone.
My father used to translate books and managed about a page per hour with an editor to offer notes. I stand by 2-3 weeks to manually translate 50 pages of dialogue and exposition to a great, shippable quality. It’s more difficult when the subject matter is this disjointed, but I don’t imagine it would slow someone down by more than 4x. Particularly if there are notes on tone and premise available.
Maybe you were just talking about the story and perhaps you’re right. A whole team might be able to handle it with perfect editor’s notes and zero questions, zero changes.
But I would like to also add that Hollow Knight’s story is very cryptic and the lines by all the characters are very disjointed. It’s also a fantasy so there are a lot of made up names, terminologies, ideas, and play on words that simply may not exist in the target language.
I don’t know what genre or language pairs your father used to translate, but English to Chinese, I imagine, is quite difficult.
I read an article about the Japanese localization of the game and the translator did a lot of back and forth with the devs (not just an editor), to discuss the world and tone. It wasn’t just a matter of “we want it this way by this day,” and boom, it’s done.
Furthermore, you have to consider all the extra UI stuff they have to translate when it comes to video games.
So, while I respect your opinion, I too stand by mine that 2 - 3 weeks seems too short especially if we include the UI stuff as well as review/QA.
It could be that your father was just better than me at translating lol.
Edit: I’m also wondering if the PPC needs to review the content (not the quality) before it is approved for sale in China.
Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that’d be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?