Attn: Game devs.

[deluges]

Many of these games are made in other languages. The errors you see are where machine translate fails.
It's not because the game developer is a third grader.

I get that. That's not what you suggested. You said that there were games in a foreign language in need of translation. Not the same thing.

 

[polywog]

I get that. That's not what you suggested. You said that there were games in a foreign language in need of translation. Not the same thing.

If google translate screws it up, especially calling everyone he, fixing it requires an understanding of what is being said to begin with. English isn't structured like most other languages. Sometimes machine translate completely destroys the story. Fixing the grammar is the least of the problem. It might make it easier to read, but he still has a vagina and that might not be what the dev had in mind.

 

[deluges]

If google translate screws it up, especially calling everyone he, fixing it requires an understanding of what is being said to begin with. English isn't structured like most other languages. Sometimes machine translate completely destroys the story. Fixing the grammar is the least of the problem. It might make it easier to read, but he still has a vagina and that might not be what the dev had in mind.

....that was kind of the point of this thread, though, to fix those mistakes. Those people don't need translators, they need editors.

EDIT: Regardless of how much text there is, it's going to be a lot easier for someone to fix a dev's mistakes than it would be for them to insert those fixes into the game. Maybe that's why they don't do it, but it would be simpler for someone starting off to go this route.

 

[polywog]

....that was kind of the point of this thread, though, to fix those mistakes. Those people don't need translators, they need editors.

EDIT: Regardless of how much text there is, it's going to be a lot easier for someone to fix a dev's mistakes than it would be for them to insert those fixes into the game. Maybe that's why they don't do it, but it would be a lot easier for someone starting off to go this route.

Download a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita in Russian machine translate it into English, and correct the grammar.
Then compare it to a properly translated version of the book. Totally different story.

 

[deluges]

Download a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita in Russian machine translate it into English, and correct the grammar.
Then compare it to a properly translated version of the book. Totally different story.

I'm sure you're right, but I've played one game, which happened to be Japanese, where the machine translation was an absolute fail and I had no idea what word they intended to use, but it didn't work out very well. Even then it was sporadic and didn't prevent me from understanding how to continue the game. The bulk of the issues I see are glaringly simple (for an English speaker) or contextual, where you can get a good idea of what they meant to say but used the wrong pronoun, as per your previous example. That's not hard to fix. I'll concede that there are surely games out there requiring actual effort, but for a lot of games that isn't the case.