Hello everyone.
My first app is nearing completion and I'm starting to think beyond the coding.
So, the first question is,
How important is translation (I'm guessing it is), and into which languages ?
What are you thoughts ?
Thanks,
Weis.
Question - How important is translation, and into which languages ?
(9 posts) (7 voices)-
Posted 2 years ago #
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In my opinion, a game can be a huge success in every country without translation. You will make more sales with a transalted game, for sure, but right now it is not worth the effort because the main market is in english.
Well it also depends on the game, if it's based on dialogs and story, translation become much more important.Posted 2 years ago # -
In my opinion a good game should be in English and Spanish.
In english because is the main language.
In spanish because is second idiom with more native speakers in the world.
Spain and a lot countries of South America.
Between 450 and 500 millions native people.See this wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language
Other language would be French.
Posted 2 years ago # -
I'm not sure about spanish. Is true that we are 450-500 millions, but you should account that the biggest users are Mexico and Spain only.
Look at this graph on this post: http://mashable.com/2009/07/23/iphone-ipod-touch-international-rise/Western Europe + North America has 84% of the market share.
In fact:
"The United States, of course, is the leader with 50.2%, followed by Germany (7.3%), France (6.8%), United Kingdom (6.4%), and Canada (3.1%)."Probably you should go with English, German and French, you will cover 75% of the market.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Obviously everybody else should just learn English, problem solved.
But seriously, if you don't have a whole lot of dialog, you might as well translate into whichever languages you easily can.
Posted 2 years ago # -
@manucorporat when you say "spanish is second idiom with more native speakers", I think you forget chinese (which should be number one I guess). Anyway, mromanuk is right, what is important is to look at the iphone market.
Posted 2 years ago # -
Second by: Wikipedia Spain
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Lenguas_por_número_de_hablantesSecond or third by: Ethnologue: Languages of the World
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnologue_list_of_most-spoken_languagesPosted 2 years ago # -
For our purposes it doesnt matter how many people speak the language - but how many likely paying customers speak the language. Sales in US, GB, CA, and AU dwarf the other countries. France and Germany are next, but the combined Spanish speaking countries may be more important I dont know. It will be interesting to see what happens with sales in China. Making LabelAtlas handle Hanzi is going to be a challenge!
Posted 2 years ago # -
Expecting software sales to be high enough in China(!) to warrant a translation of your game into chinese seems a tad optimistic to me.
Posted 2 years ago #
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