How do you translate games?

[HentaiHerald]

Hi, I've been wanting to find a way to pitch in and help this wonderful community but I don't really want to write or create my own content. I've noticed that a lot of games go untranslated but since I only speak English I assumed I couldn't help out. Is that true? Would it be ok to translate games by using a machine translation then going through the files and editing scenes so the reading is smooth and understandable? Is this sort of thing allowed? Is it more difficult than I think? If you guys have any tutorials or links to other threads that could give me advice I'd appreciate it!

 

[hanku99]

Knowing another language is obviously helpful, but many indie games are built without forward thought put towards later adding translations.
A typical mechanism for adding translation capabilities to a game is to catalog all "strings", or sentences of text. This catalog will then be used to replace the actual static placement of text, and instead use references to the database/catalog.
Once this is in place, each string can be translated and stored into a new catalog. This makes selecting the language in-game simply result in the game loading the matching strings database. And each sentence of text in game will automatically show the new language.

I suppose you can help in this regard by offering to help compile and arrange the existing English strings of a project or game, and reach out to communities to recruit assistance with translating to different languages.