Mezzanine Stairs

We’re often asked about translating World’s End into other languages, and a few people have expressed desire to create fan translations. We intend to make this possible.

For me, the challenge will be making the user interface dynamic. I’ve experimented with some of the game’s menus using a quick machine translation to get a feel for what the effort will entail.

The verbosity of some languages is intimidating. One of my interface design goals to has been to keep the language as compact and minimalistic as possible, so some redesign will be inevitable. Considering these translation challenges has given me an appreciation for why in-game menus tend to be so sparse and boring: How much space will this setting’s label take up? Who knows! Just make room. I really have no excuse, though, since I’m an old hand at making dynamic interfaces having spent the 2000s making interactive web sites in Flash.

Translators will primarily be faced with the length of the script, which has grown to 207,000 words (90,000 of which are Chapter 4 alone). The nuance of linguistic stereotypes in the script will also be a challenge. How will the Redshields’ speech come off when translated into German, for example, given their obvious Teutonic influence?

Not to mention Vadim. Question for the audience: how well do you understand Vadim? If you were asked to render the above dialogue into proper English, how would you word it?

All of this, however, will be after we release World’s End in English. Skill tree, iconography and other final touch posts are incoming.