Devblog #58

I bet you are a bit tired of constant "I did that" and "I am working on this" updates, so I thought that maybe I should switch it up a bit and talk about some general issues that might trouble the development of a game. Like for example, something that I never expected to be an issue at all - translation.

Right off the bat I knew I would make the game in English and Russian, those are two languages that I know well and I can be certain that I could make the translation myself. And most importantly, I thought that that should be enough. But as time went on, more and more people started asking for other languages. Spanish, French, Chinese, German, and I even had one Vietnamese request. Even though I did expect to translate the game to other languages eventually, I was not expecting people to actually ask for translations. But regardless of my expectations, I am now faced by a conundrum: try working on translations to other languages, or leave things as is and ignore the plights of potential fans.

One might think that there's no problem with translation nowadays with the advent of LLMs and them being able to translate large swaths of text with great effect. I would not lie, it would be nigh impossible for me to translate all the text in the game just by myself, so I am using LLMs to help with translation, but all the text that it outputs needs to be read through, checked, and more often than not - re-written. Sadly, you just cannot trust the machine to do a complete translation right now.

Some might say that that would be "better than nothing", but those people have not read as much of the LLM-translated text as I had. I still did consider that option, but then I read about Silksong's release being ruined for Chinese players because of not so nice translation, and I thought to myself "And that happened to a game that is not 90% text"! So that idea has been put on the shelf for now...

Another option, of course, is to find people to translate the game, or at least check the LLM's translations for me. But that poses another issue. A lot of new events are being written and revised by me up until the very day of the release. I could theoretically send something to a translator to finish within a day, but that would only be possible with paid translators, because I don't think it would be fair to impose this kind of schedule upon volunteers. And I definitely could not just release new events in some languages and not others, so every added language would make the number of dependencies grow.

Arrrrgh. Yeah. So this is what I am thinking about now. Maybe the solution will come to me next week.

I'll see you all then. Shady Character One, out!