ha i remembered..

it’s not American English..I’d call it simple English..and so everybody understands..even people that know only a few words in English..and don’t tell me about diversity..I’d LOL all the way to America if I ever see a site like this Translated in Romanian..so you can’t tell me I don’t know how it is

Auser Posted:

INCIT and Forumbuildr mostly

If it generated new users, and the translation was free, I think it could be feasible to have separate multi-player components for each language (which also means each new forumbuildr win doesn’t need to be translated). Have a shared core game, but separate community options. I know of several other (admittedly larger) online games that do it just like that.

You guys are talking about an ideal community where everyone fallows the rules..English speaking ppl post on their side..Spanish(its just an ex) post on theirs..get real..im sure you’ve played MMORPGS before..

It will be Chaos

anyway I’ve said or there is to say

Evil Trout Posted:

Very early on in development I decided not to program Forumwarz in a way that would allow most of the text to be localized easily.

We thought that most of the humour and jokes wouldn’t translate well to other languages, and the extra work involved just wouldn’t be worth it. Also, back then Ruby on Rails didn’t have great support for it.

I don’t really regret it, to be honest. I know it limits our markets, but we are plenty busy already just supporting this one language.

As for advertising in non-US sites, I can see us doing that in the future. Right now we’re still figuring out what ads work and what ones don’t. We’re slowing buying more and more ads each week, and eventually we might try something that isn’t in English.

Answering the questions (IMO of course)

1- Most of the jokes CAN be translated into equally funny other jokes, IF it’s done by a person that dominates both english and the language they’re translating the stuff to.

2- I DO know it’s difficult to implement something like this, and I DO know time is scarce. But putting an effort into this is a sure way to attract more users. A game that is very supportive attracts a lot more people. It would also be supported by the community; so no translating work for CZ.

3- ADS in other languages attract people that use that language, but it doesn’t mean they speak English fluently. Quoting myself: “A game that is very supportive attracts a lot more people. It would also be supported by the community; so no translating work for CZ.”. This would make the ads much more attractive.

I answered it like this as I already found myself giving up of a game that had Portuguese ads but with Chinese as used language. I don’t really want this to happen to FWZ as this is a great game.

Also, I know, tl;dr. But meh, that’s my POV.

OrsonScottCard Posted:

The Great Trout has spoken.

Thread’s closed, everybody go home.

TEH Man Posted:

u cant translate it, otherwise the ethnic humor (Dr. Jojo i.e.) would be lost.

but if it is going to be translated, make it dutch, nl ftw!

Good point. There’s where the competence of the translators come in. If done well, it won’t completely ruin the humor of the game. It’s OBVIOUS it’s not gonna be the same; but sacrificing bits of humor for the accessibility of the game is a good deal to me.

EDIT: Fixed some typo.

To the guy who complained about forumbuildr having to be translated weekly- just put the forums through babelfish before you put them through the unintelligencer. It’s not like they don’t already speak stupidly, babelfish-induced grammar errors won’t make them look any worse.

Can’t international users translate it on the fly with google or altavista?

It may be worth having a language choice.

Seems like an awful lot of work, though.

then what happens with flamebate?

the whole process appears too resource consuming to be beneficial. It’s definitely worth considering, though.

Buzzeno Posted:

French, German and Italian.

i think, say no to italian say yes to spanish…

but forumwarz wouldn’t be a community if everyone spoke like french and german i think…

Blaivid Posted:

Log in to see images!

Most of the humour will be lost (how would you translate a LOLcat or a FAIL in any language?!?) and will create some smaller groups, thus loosing the idea of “community” behind Forumwarz. (all IMHO obviously)

we emos we get eachother.. Log in to see images!