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Having worked with a Chinese publisher who helped us review the localization we had made by a third party, it seems there are some important nuances to consider when translating that can lead to the translations feeling confusing/low quality for native Chinese players. They seem to be particularly picky about it and when you're an indie dev with limited resources, it's hard to validate that it's been done well.

Personally, I went with it anyway because the Chinese audience on Steam is HUGE and any indie dev would be making a bad call NOT to localize their game in Chinese.

Another thing is that not every indie dev knows how to manage a localized game. Every game update means every language supported needs to be updated. It's rough. However Chinese and Russian are two localizations where the native speakers really care about having the game in their own language. It's worth the effort!

i think yes, localization translation is a hard work, i think this part, we can use some AI to make sure they are right, like some AI train by chinese datas, machine translation often get wrong. and as i know, some developers usually ask for help to find some chinese guy to translate, i think it's a nice voluntary work, cuz there are actually some chinese like a game and wanna translate for it, but some of them just dont know how to contact with developers, sometimes i even saw some eng developors went to QQ to ask chinese for help to tranaslate chinese lol(QQ = Chinese Discord)

Asking Chinese people on QQ would probably get you better results than AI would. Anyone reading AI translated text knows it's AI immediately.

yep, finding a real chinese guy is 100% better than AI, and for me AI translation is better than machine translation, cuz AI translation sometimes can get chinese memes and translate it to the same meaning eng memes, but machine translation cant, it just directly translate the literally meaning lol, like it will translate "鸡同鸭讲" to "chicken talk to duck", and here is the AI translation: "talk at cross-purposes"