Black, Red, Gold, and the Rising Sun
I'm going to talk about where we are with Cultist Simulator localisation. Throughout this post, I've embedded thumbnails of some of the Q&As I've had with translators. Click on 'em if you want to know why translating this game is such a total pain in the bum.
ON THE MATTER OF THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE TRANSLATIONS: We've moved the German and Japanese localisations from the beta to the main branch. We had dozens of extremely detailed and helpful bug reports - particularly for Japanese, where the culture gap from English is much bigger - and the localisation is in much better shape now.
There will still be issues we've missed. Please let us know at [email protected]; and please include a screenshot, it's worth a thousand Google-translated words. Thanks for all your help.
Some Russian-speaking players have objected to some of the choices the translator made. It's impossible for us as non-Russian speakers to judge quality, so we need to be careful with feedback from the Internet (there's always the possibility a stranger is mischievous or wrong). Please keep sending us specific details of specific problems, and we'll run them by the loc company, who generally say 'yes that was a mistake' or 'oh that makes more sense'.
I think the Exile translation suffered particularly because this was the first bit of Cultist that the translator had worked on (the main Russian translation was by two other providers that we don't use any more). This meant (a) they had a *lot* to digest, because the Exile lore builds on the Cultist lore (b) there were inconsistencies with translation choices in the original game.
This is more generally a problem Lottie and I are wrestling with for future localisations of Cultist and of BOOK OF HOURS. My writing is notoriously full of arcane references and stupid quasi-puns that you only get after forty hours of play or whatever. Most professional translators don't have the grounding in Cultist lore, but we need to keep working with professional translators because fan translations are hard to wrangle to deadlines and production plans. We'll find a middle way.
Talking of fan translations... our Chinese translation of the original game was the only one done by volunteers, but by professionally organised volunteers working through Indienova. This meant the translation was actually very high quality, because it was performed by fans of the game who knew and cared about the lore.
Last night Lottie and I happened to look at the Exile page and found we'd dropped into Mixed reviews, because a number of Chinese volunteers are cross that they haven't been credited. Lottie and I are really sorry about this - we feel strongly about crediting people fairly. We're waiting on a final credits list from Indienova now. If you're a volunteer and you're missing from the credits, please please get in touch with them to make sure you're included.
(There's another issue, where the translation was apparently not polished to the volunteers' satisfaction, which I don't completely understand - I've had conflicting emails about this - but I can say we're talking to Indienova about it now and we'll update it as it comes.)
We've had people asking for Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Spanish translations, among others. This really depends on how well German and Japanese do. It costs us tens of thousands of Euros and probably three person-weeks of my and Lottie's time to translate into a new language (in case you missed it, Weather Factory is only two people) so we have a really narrow pipeline. But it might happen!
I recently updated the modding framework so that community translation mods are much more practical, and we've currently got four community translations on the Steam Workshop. Thank you to the creators for putting the time and effort into this. I've added Workshop tags so translations should be easier to find now.
★ Português Brasil
★ French
★ Italiano
★ 한국어
ON THE MATTER OF THE GERMAN AND JAPANESE TRANSLATIONS: We've moved the German and Japanese localisations from the beta to the main branch. We had dozens of extremely detailed and helpful bug reports - particularly for Japanese, where the culture gap from English is much bigger - and the localisation is in much better shape now.
There will still be issues we've missed. Please let us know at [email protected]; and please include a screenshot, it's worth a thousand Google-translated words. Thanks for all your help.
ON THE MATTER OF THE RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF EXILE:
Some Russian-speaking players have objected to some of the choices the translator made. It's impossible for us as non-Russian speakers to judge quality, so we need to be careful with feedback from the Internet (there's always the possibility a stranger is mischievous or wrong). Please keep sending us specific details of specific problems, and we'll run them by the loc company, who generally say 'yes that was a mistake' or 'oh that makes more sense'.
I think the Exile translation suffered particularly because this was the first bit of Cultist that the translator had worked on (the main Russian translation was by two other providers that we don't use any more). This meant (a) they had a *lot* to digest, because the Exile lore builds on the Cultist lore (b) there were inconsistencies with translation choices in the original game.
This is more generally a problem Lottie and I are wrestling with for future localisations of Cultist and of BOOK OF HOURS. My writing is notoriously full of arcane references and stupid quasi-puns that you only get after forty hours of play or whatever. Most professional translators don't have the grounding in Cultist lore, but we need to keep working with professional translators because fan translations are hard to wrangle to deadlines and production plans. We'll find a middle way.
ON THE MATTER OF THE CHINESE TRANSLATION OF EXILE:
Talking of fan translations... our Chinese translation of the original game was the only one done by volunteers, but by professionally organised volunteers working through Indienova. This meant the translation was actually very high quality, because it was performed by fans of the game who knew and cared about the lore.
Last night Lottie and I happened to look at the Exile page and found we'd dropped into Mixed reviews, because a number of Chinese volunteers are cross that they haven't been credited. Lottie and I are really sorry about this - we feel strongly about crediting people fairly. We're waiting on a final credits list from Indienova now. If you're a volunteer and you're missing from the credits, please please get in touch with them to make sure you're included.
(There's another issue, where the translation was apparently not polished to the volunteers' satisfaction, which I don't completely understand - I've had conflicting emails about this - but I can say we're talking to Indienova about it now and we'll update it as it comes.)
ON THE MATTER OF FUTURE LOCALISATIONS:
We've had people asking for Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian and Spanish translations, among others. This really depends on how well German and Japanese do. It costs us tens of thousands of Euros and probably three person-weeks of my and Lottie's time to translate into a new language (in case you missed it, Weather Factory is only two people) so we have a really narrow pipeline. But it might happen!
ON THE MATTER OF COMMUNITY TRANSLATIONS:
I recently updated the modding framework so that community translation mods are much more practical, and we've currently got four community translations on the Steam Workshop. Thank you to the creators for putting the time and effort into this. I've added Workshop tags so translations should be easier to find now.
★ Português Brasil
★ French
★ Italiano
★ 한국어
