To Dev,
As a passionate but picky fan, I am not pleased with the current Chinese translation of this game. This official Chinese translation is bad to my standard, lacking consistency, weird word choices for names and troop types, sometimes just plainly wrong.
In fact I switched back to English immediately after I glanced through the official Chinese translations when it came out. I might not be a good English speaker, at least my level of English reading is enough for me to enjoy this game. However, majority of Chinese players do not have such language skills. They are stuck with what is given.
As an enthusiast, I would like to fix things myself. I collect all the information from taransworld and gowdb, and make it into an excel file with all troop spells/traits/weapon spells/weapon affixes translated again with consistency and easy-to-understand in mind. https://drive.google.com/open?id=143-lq1fxAzp1OWR6vPIVngimZ0I2dzFE
Here is the file. This is the most recent one I released to my Chinese community. First draft was done around last August.
I have reported some Chinese localization errors three times, but no changes were made accordingly. Some errors were left untouched ever since the first version of Chinese translation. New players always confused when they saw these errors. I’ve personally cleared up similar confusion nearly 100 times.
So after all this time, I want to go one step further and implement my translation into this game, replace the original one.
Now I have a question. Hypothetically speaking, I implement my translation into this game. Since this is technically hacking game files, will accounts get banned? Especially a lot of players got banned recently because of hacking, this really concerns me.
I hope they allow you to do so after spending hours of your own time to research and write up. All they have to do is ask and check that there is no hidden script or back door and implement. Good luck.
This is interesting, because I think Infinity Plus Two paid for professional translating into Chinese (note: I don’t know this for sure, and Salty may come in and correct me). It does not speak highly of their translator if a fan needs to switch back to English to play the game, or spend a lot of effort correcting the supposedly professionally-done work.
To the point, though: regardless of whether it’s “fair” or “harmless” or whatever, modifying the game files may result in a ban. I honestly doubt you’ll get any answer more specific than that.
There’s wording inconsistencies in every language of Gems of War and this is our fault as the original English files are inconsistent. This is something we’re currently working on fixing but Gems of War has more words than Sun Tzu’s The Art of War … and the game word count is multiplied by the number of languages we support - so it’s a HUGE long term undertaking which starts with us cleaning up the base language - English.
I know you’re frustrated with the Chinese translations, but it does take time for us to implement changes, we are a company and cannot make these changes on the fly or there’d be more issues.
Also, while we always take your feedback and send it to the translator responsible for your language for consideration, after discussion we may decide not to change it for many reasons, the main 3 reasons I can think of are:
It doesn’t fit the style of the game and our creative direction
We specifically don’t require our translators to do literal, direct translations of everything - we ask them to translate in a way which makes the most sense in the target language and in a way which is a better cultural fit. The best example of this is on our silly puns or rhymes found throughout the game.
We may have plans to change that text in all languages or re-write entire descriptions in the future so changing it immediately would be double work.
We’re always very grateful to players who provide feedback on our translations and we do regularly consider and end up changing text based on the feedback we receive, however, please also know that no matter which translators we have, what the translator writes, or in which language, and no matter which game it is the text will never please everyone and we will always receive feedback on how poor the translations are and how it can be improved/fixed. In other words this isn’t a unique issue to Gems of War or to Infinity Plus Two - it affects every game ever translated anywhere.
We also get feedback about our base language, English.
I decided to post this lengthy reply to hopefully give you some insight into game localisation, although I understand you’re frustrated, we don’t ignore your feedback and we definitely don’t make changes slowly or not at all just to be difficult.
TL;DR
Yes, we want to improve the consistency of the game text in every language
We appreciate your feedback on the translations
Changing any game files, including the localisation files may flag your account for hacking and incur an automatic ban.
