What would be a fair price to pay someone to do a manual partial translation? (Menu, Settings, Items, etc.)

[Oir]

Hello all!

This is way way way far down the line but I'll eventually be looking for someone to help me out with a partial translation for a game I'm working on. I'd be looking for a manual translation, no MTL which I'd be willing to pay for. I'm not looking to penny pinch or cheat anyone and want to pay a fair price for it.

For a translation of no dialogue (just menus, settings, items, statuses, etc. that kinda stuff) what would be a fair market rate to pay someone? I know it varies depending on exactly how many words but I'm just looking for a ball park for an average scope game with no dialogue.

Thanks all!

(Also, if any devs have had good experiences with any translators, I'd love some recommendations. Again, this is WAY far down the line though.)

 

[Bev_]

Like you said, It depends on amount of text, language, complexity, quality etc.

I'd suggest you googling rates per word for languages you're gonna use and go for the lower one, coz text probably will be very basic.

 

[79flavors]

I assume you're talking about the RPGM game in your .sig.
Perhaps someone else could answer this, as I don't know much about RPGM...

But in RenPy, it's very easy to reverse engineer things to be able to look at the underlying source code using tools like UnRen.
And since the majority of RenPy games (mostly) share common UI's, the translations of all those UIs have already been done by other people in other games. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but a good 90% of the core translatable strings have probably already been done by someone else - and therefore copying those parts of their translations would mean you'd only need to pay for those additional elements that are unique to your game.

Again, I don't know how well this idea would work for RPGM - but if applicable, it would keep your costs down.

 

[Oir]

I assume you're talking about the RPGM game in your .sig.
Perhaps someone else could answer this, as I don't know much about RPGM...

But in RenPy, it's very easy to reverse engineer things to be able to look at the underlying source code using tools like UnRen.
And since the majority of RenPy games (mostly) share common UI's, the translations of all those UIs have already been done by other people in other games. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but a good 90% of the core translatable strings have probably already been done by someone else - and therefore copying those parts of their translations would mean you'd only need to pay for those additional elements that are unique to your game.

Again, I don't know how well this idea would work for RPGM - but if applicable, it would keep your costs down.

Haha, the game in my sig is just my favourite which is done by HouseGame, a Japanese dev. I'm sure the time to shamelessly shill for my own game will come in the future though!

That's an interesting idea and I'll look into that, thank you very much!