English "Translations" for Poorly Written Games

[doogmajor]

I've been lurking here for a few years, and I've found a lot of great games thanks to this site. One thing that's always puzzled me, however, is that there are many games with sizeable followings here that have near unreadable English text. I realize writing is hard (especially when English is not your native language), and a lot of these solo devs have enough work on their plates already, but I do find that a constant stream of obvious typos/broken grammar/nonsensical sentences make it very difficult for me to enjoy a game. Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but it does make it feel like the work put into these games is wasted when a segment of the audience can't even make it through the game due to something that seems so simple to fix.

So with a modding scene like this community has, I'm surprised that I don't see English translations or patches that address this issue. I was wondering if you guys had ideas as to why that might be. Am I alone in my thinking on this and there's just no demand for something like that here? Are there examples of this kind of thing and I've just missed them?

Also, I'm thinking about trying to learn how to do this myself for fun, so any advice there would also be appreciated.

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

For Japanese games, they rarely get a professional translation, especially the more niche and shovelware titles. Just shove the text through Google Translate (or 1996 Babelfish, it feels like) and copy-paste it back in so you can sell a few extra copies to the gaijin. Not many, since they'll probably pirate it anyway.

For the legions of Russian devs (this seems to be a thing in this cottage industry of crowdfunded smut), I guess either they overestimate their own English skills, or they're just too cheap to hire someone to look the text over. Wouldn't even have to be someone who understands Russian; many of the games I've seen could substantially benefit from just a fluent English speaker tidying up Boris's Runglish output. Then again, I've seen some such games become quite popular (off the top of my head, Corruption is pretty rough in that regard), so apparently it's no bar to success. Definitely drives people like me away, though.

 

[doogmajor]

For the legions of Russian devs (this seems to be a thing in this cottage industry of crowdfunded smut), I guess either they overestimate their own English skills, or they're just too cheap to hire someone to look the text over. Wouldn't even have to be someone who understands Russian; many of the games I've seen could substantially benefit from just a fluent English speaker tidying up Boris's Runglish output. Then again, I've seen some such games become quite popular (off the top of my head, Corruption is pretty rough in that regard), so apparently it's no bar to success. Definitely drives people like me away, though.

It was actually upon my annual attempt at playing Corruption ("Surely it's not as bad you remember, let's give it another shot," I think to myself) that the idea for this thread popped into my head. The attempt, as always, ended promptly during the intro when I met, and I quote, "my neighborhood, Megan" who greeted me "Where do you go from morning?"

Edit: And I really don't mean to belittle non-English speakers. It's not the words themselves, but that they've remained in a semi-professional game despite being obvious mistakes