Hello, I wanted to say that it is very, very unfair that all games are translated into different languages except Persian! Is Persian language not considered? And please don't tell me to make it yourself, I have neither the knowledge nor the position.
S.t.s - This response is not to belittle your plight, just to offer a few observations from a developer's perspective.
- In general, including translations in a game significantly increases the complexity of the development. Take FF&S, for example. I am frequently fiddling with the text right down to the point where I'm ready to release it, because frequently I find that the dialog or text I wrote is hard to express in an image, or I come up with a better image and so adapt the text to the image or image sequence. Unless the dev is bilingual, this then means sending the game off to someone else who is, and who also does have the knowledge as to how to perform the translation, then reassembling the translations into the game before publishing it. This increases the development cycle, unless the dev is willing to have the "version with translations" significantly lag the "version in the dev's native language."
- There are devs who do release multi-lingual games. From the ones I've investigated, it's most often "I write it in my native language and then also include English." Not always, but very common. It is my personal opinion that they do this to broaden the appeal of the game - to increase the number of people who would play it. Thus, to some extent, the choice of "do I translate into Language X or not" is going to be highly dependent on "how many additional people will doing that get me as subscribers, and is it worth the effort"
- Doing AI translations is theoretically possible, but I strongly suspect that the result could be stilted and non-idiomatic. It's already challenging for someone who's bilingual to translate colloquial expressions into another language. I've seen laughable stories of what happens of you take an expression in English, use AI to translate it into another language and then use that same AI to translate it back. (There's a classic story about round-tripping "out of sight, out of mind" and getting back "blind idiot." Whether true or not, I don't know.)
- Persian, in particular, poses additional challenges. First, many standard fonts don't include the required characters, so that adds to the technical challenge. Second, as I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong) Persian is written in a variant of the Arabic alphabet, and is written and read right-to-left. While Ren'py does have some support right-to-left text, done properly this could require an entirely different layout of the game, since many things should, in theory, be mirror imaged when you switched into Persian. While theoretically possible, this is very technically challenging, and perhaps beyond the technical capability of a great many devs. (I certainly don't know, off the top of my head, how to do it. Ren'py screen variants, perhaps.)
So, in summary, a big reason many games aren't translated at all, let alone to Persian, can be summarized in your last sentence - to do it, you have to find someone who's sufficiently bilingual to do a good job of it, and who also has the technical knowledge as to
how to do it. There just aren't a ton of people who have both those skills.
If there are people out there who have the language skills to translate games but not the technical knowledge, there are people such as me who would be more than willing to teach them the technical parts. Ren'py, in particular, has a well-established system for translations, and one doesn't have to have programming skills to use it. The dev generates a set of files for you, and the translator then goes through them in and edits them. With that knowledge, someone could then theoretically be in a position to contribute translations to the population here, either by working directly with devs or "freelance."
Also, please understand,
S.t.s , that I'm not in any way trying to put you on the spot by writing the above. That was a legitimate offer to the world at large for any game, not for mine.