Devsourced Generic String Translation

Thousands of translators have done the same job over and over. Menus and Settings. A simple spreadsheet is here to change that, and let translators focus on the custom text a game needs.

tuomas karmakallio, Blogger

July 24, 2015

2 Min Read

[EDIT] Link to Next Post in the PolyglotGamedev Project

A couple of days ago,

I stumbled onto this project called 'Polyglot' by Simon Prefontaine ( @Pixelpoutine ).

The idea is to have the generic menu and settings strings, and some other staples of videogame lingo translated by crowdsourcing. It was off to a good start, and seeing the potential, I decided to add more Finnish to it, then started adding more strings, and then started to spread the word about this. The use case for this project is translation of precise and conventionally used terms. The results will certainly be better than what Google Translate currently provides.

The page is viewable, downloadable and commentable by default, so people who do not wish to acquire editing permissions may still contribute. Editing permissions may be requested from Simon ( details on the first tab of the spreadsheet). Editing should naturally be taken seriously, as it is easy to cause havoc in a spreadsheet if you don't have some idea of what you are doing.

We hope any translators here will see this as a tool, as the aim is not to put you out of a job, but to cut out the endlessly repetitive part that wastes thousands of human-hours of work in total, and hopefully enable developers to spend some of their shoestring and bubblegum budgets on localizing really unique flavortext, stories, names, places, and so forth.

Here's the link to the Google Sheet. Please read the instructions on the first page.

I hope any of you who see blank spaces and know somebody who might spend an hour filling them in for the betterment of mankind, please do share the link. Props to Simon for setting up this fantastic solution to a problem that has been around for years and years. And if somebody has already done something like this, please consider joining forces : Together the Spreadsheets Could Be Invincible!

We hope to have a first clean version ready within a few weeks, which could then be stored in a repository and iterated on when necessary. The is aim to have all the languages supported by Steam on the list complete in this first pass of the project.

Polyglot