Localizing Papers, Please
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Localizing Papers, Please
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#2Very interesting article. I can't how imagine how difficult it must have been to support localization after the game was released.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#3In case you don't see the link, Pope created a web interface, hosted on Github Pages, that allows users to easily do the localization, collaborate via Github forks, and import/export their work via CSV:
http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/
Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also know how to whip up a useful, well-designed web-app for the purposes of supporting his game like this.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#4Localization professional and developer here. I'd recommend taking a look at Transifex. This is a well thought out tool for managing localization projects and assets (prompt catalogs, resx files, etc), and for managing the translation process (it supports machine, crowd and professional translation, so you can optimize for cost and quality).
They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translating web content super easy. You just embed some JS in your template, and it re-writes the pages in translation when needed. Way way easier than, for example, setting up a multilingual Drupal site, and in most cases, will get the job done nicely.
My $0.02
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#5Localization professional and developer here. I'd recommend taking a look at Transifex. This is a well thought out tool for managing localization projects and assets (prompt catalogs, resx files, etc), and for managing the translation process (it supports machine, crowd and professional translation, so you can optimize for cost and quality). They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translatin…
I use Excel XML spreadsheets (so I don't have to write my own tools) as tabular stores for stuff like I18N, item lists, and so on, but a way to actually manage translation has generally eluded me. Never heard of Transifex before but this'll help me out with my own gamedev.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#6Localization professional and developer here. I'd recommend taking a look at Transifex. This is a well thought out tool for managing localization projects and assets (prompt catalogs, resx files, etc), and for managing the translation process (it supports machine, crowd and professional translation, so you can optimize for cost and quality). They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translatin…
I use Excel XML spreadsheets (so I don't have to write my own tools) as tabular stores for stuff like I18N, item lists, and so on, but a way to actually manage translation has generally eluded me. Never heard of Transifex before but this'll help me out with my own gamedev.
Transifex has largely become a standard for large open source projects that need string translation (think Openstreetmap and LibreOffice large). I bring up OpenOffice because they have used Pootle, which was the alternative for years and I always found it so-so. But people with more experience can pipe in.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#7In case you don't see the link, Pope created a web interface, hosted on Github Pages, that allows users to easily do the localization, collaborate via Github forks, and import/export their work via CSV: http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/ Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also know how to whip up a usefu…
> makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..
FWIW, playing Papers Please, you can easily come to the same conclusion. The game is a great game.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#8In case you don't see the link, Pope created a web interface, hosted on Github Pages, that allows users to easily do the localization, collaborate via Github forks, and import/export their work via CSV: http://paperspleaseloc.github.io/ Pretty brilliant...reading Pope's devlog for the game makes it clear that he's an excellent game developer and designer..but it's unexpected that he'd also know how to whip up a usefu…
It is always interesting to see people use CSV in place of the established file format for translations, POT files. There are logic for certain grammatical elements (IIRC, it has been a while) and other edge cases that are exactly why one avoids homegrown CSV in the first place.
Then again, even Papers Please is making common mistakes. I can count on a single finger the number of i18n jobs I have seen. One in many years of looking at IT jobs. This stuff is little understood, and very little demand. But he makes of pointing out how this will causes problems.
I would love to see this game in Arabic, for example. Number in Arabic is crazy complicated, and as a guy who translated software for FOSS (arabeyes.org) there is a reason I bring up the number logic (1, dual, 3-99, 1000+ dictate different noun classes) and POT handles that. This and many other issues indicate why no one can be bothered to handle this until much later, and then it is such a pain in the ass with non-English charsets.
Not that this issue has come up a lot on HN recently. I am glad people are showing this stuff with interest. Regardless of my opinion, this is very cool work and I am glad to see developers caring again.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#9Very minor complaint but first of January 1984 is always depicted as '1984.01.01' in the game, regardless of I18N selected. While this is good in Germany, it many countries like US you instead prefer something like '1/1/84'.
Re: Localizing Papers, Please
#10Localization professional and developer here. I'd recommend taking a look at Transifex. This is a well thought out tool for managing localization projects and assets (prompt catalogs, resx files, etc), and for managing the translation process (it supports machine, crowd and professional translation, so you can optimize for cost and quality). They also just released a really neat Javascript tool which makes translatin…
I'd recommend against Transifex. They were originally an open project, but ended up going proprietary and abandoning the open version, causing problems for various projects that depended on it. Take a look at some of the alternatives, instead, such as Zanata (http://zanata.org/).