Yea but what about Latin language support?

If you follow a game on Steam, anytime the devs post an update you see it in your Activity tab. It’s a nice feature, and makes it easy to keep up with games that receive frequent updates (like Early Access titles). With each update, you also see a few of the comments people have made related to that update.

I’ve noticed a trend that for almost any title, there are always people asking for the game to be translated to some language, often Chinese or Russian. The more recent trend is people firing back to learn English. For example. Or this.

I don’t know why, but I find the whole thing infinitely amusing. Just a little culture war going on in the Steam comments section. Keep doing you internet, keep doing you.

About SynCaine

Former hardcore raider turned casual gamer.
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2 Responses to Yea but what about Latin language support?

  1. Having done some internationalization for consumer software in the past, it isn’t an impossible task if you design for it by externalizing text in resource files and such. But there are still pitfalls. You’ll find out fast that the German translation from English will need more space much of the time, for example. I hope your display area has the space.

    It also costs money, both up front to get the translation and to maintain it over time if you update your product. This is not trivial unless your product has minimal text.

    And, of course, you do put yourself at the mercy of the person or company doing the translation. One of the problems with EVE Online right now is that the Russian translation is despised by Russian players for being nonsensically bad in the context of the game, but the academic doing it is more interested doing things the way they believe is correct than catering to people playing a futuristic space game.

    However, if you want to sell into a market, China for example, you had better translate. If you don’t, or are too small to tackle that sort of project, then you just get to put up with those requests.

  2. Esteban says:

    The ‘learn english, furriner!’ pushback is especially funny when directed at people who very clearly do speak the language, but might enjoy a localisation for easier/better immersion.

    Nothing wrong with letting a company know that there might be a market for it – but of course we’ve got real life political attitudes bleeding over.

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