作者：Ubrain Bruno

在《Epistory》，输入内容是玩家与游戏互动的唯一方式。你将以各种方式有趣地敲打许多单词并最终创造出许多文本内容。我们不会只使用一些随机的单词，而会使用那些满足各种条件的单词（游戏邦注：如有关主题和游戏玩法）。所以对于那些并不是使用英语的玩家来说，我们的翻译工作尤为重要。

让我们着眼于本土化文本内容所面临的主要挑战以及我们的解决方法。

故事脚本

首先，最简单且也是最无趣的便是故事脚本。我们的故事是基于一个很有趣的主题（我们的作家还为其写了一篇文章）。但故事的本土化却只是基于常规的翻译。

在游戏中，脚本文本是以分散在游戏世界中的句子的形式呈现出来，即玩家将在探索的过程中看到这些内容。结果便是脚本看起来就像是一些不相关的句子。所以翻译者所面临的挑战便是让这些句子练习在一起去组成一个完整的故事。我们为每个句子的上下文编写了一些评论，结果似乎还不错。提供给翻译者最重要的文本部分很重要：是字面意思，还是潜在含义，或者只是一种风格？

文字输入

除了故事脚本，对于文本我们的其它用途便是呈现提示词。我们会在“互动元素”旁边使用单词去促进某种互动，如种花或摧毁一块岩石。我们的目的是赋予玩家输入的内容意义并避免出现重复。但是我们并不能手动将特定单词分配到每个元素上。我们还需要控制我们所使用的单词的复杂性，并努力保持难度的平衡。最后我们需要处理拥有不同单词长度和特殊字符的语言。

对于游戏玩法，我们的解决方法是提供给每种元素一个词典如此我们便可以随机从中挑选单词。该词典具有特定在主题和单词长度限制。举个例子来说吧，创造花的这一行动是简单的，所以词典中便会出现8个字符以内有关花名的单词。而因为摧毁岩石更复杂，所以其词典便会使用8到10个字符间的矿物质名称。

Epistory(from gamasutra)

关于本土化，翻译者需要为每种语言使用相同的限制条件去填满词典。

Early Access中的多种语言

如今《Epistory》已经到达了6个月的early access（游戏邦注:Valve在Steam平台上推出的一个项目,让用户可以在游戏正式发售前体验这些游戏)的尾声。从early access第一天开始所有的内容便都包含了英文，德文和法文版本。之后还将添加西班牙文。

一方面，基于多种语言进行early access是合理的。除了将游戏带向更多玩家外，它还让我们能够审核early access架构的质量。就像如果没有这些内容，我们便不会想到去创造一个德文和瑞士文转换的词典。一个德国粉丝甚至主动帮我们校对脚本内容！

另一方面，这将推动我们多次执行翻译过程，即我们将在脚本和关卡设计中进行迭代，而这是非常消耗时间的。这里存在的挑战便是如何轻松地整合我们的迭代版本。

在经过多次调整后，我们最终创造了一个可行的配置：在Excel文件中编写脚本它将直接输出一个XML文件，同时在带有自制脚本的谷歌电子表格中创造词典将输入一个JSON文件。

这里的关键便是在early access期间保持有限的语言（在发行时我们又会增添3种语言）。但考虑到翻译需要做的事并且我们需要遵守截止期限，所以我并不建议你们创造需要大量文本内容的游戏。你最好仍然坚持以英语为基础，至少你需要确保源内容不会有太大的改变。

特殊字符

所有华丽的语言都有其自身的“怪癖”，如果那并不是你的母语你便很难搞清楚它们的使用方法。而我们最关心的便是那些特殊的字符（如法语中的?，德语中的?，波兰语中的?等）。我们甚至需要翻译俄文，即关于西里尔字母。

对此我们采取的第一种方法便是与专业翻译者进行紧密合作以更好地理解每种语言。我们询问了各种问题，包括特殊字符的使用，出现频率，怎样的键盘布局更受欢迎等等。

这些信息帮助我们为玩家输入创造了适当的文字规则。我们认为常见的特殊字符也是语言中非常重要的一部分。并且我们会尽力避免那些很少出现且需要进行多次按键的字符。总之我们会努力避免玩家因为面对自己本土语言中一些最复杂的单词而感到受挫的情况。

关于这一问题的另一面便是使用特殊字体去呈现这些单词。基于文本在游戏中出现的不同位置我们会使用不同字体，但是我们却不希望因为不同语言而去改变字体。所以我们选择了最简单的解决方法：即仔细选择我们想要呈现的字体并亲自添加任何特殊字符。我们必须购买一些专门的软件授权，但我们却不可能找到一个包含所有所需字符的合适字体。

允许玩家进行编辑

最后，我们希望添加一些没有太大挑战但却充满机遇的内容。我们以大量基于文本的内容作为一种优势：即只要改变词典任何人都能够编辑并创造出某些内容。

这也是我们为什么要想办法让玩家去编辑并分享自己的词典的原因。我们已经见过一个想要在外语课上使用《Epistory》去教授自己学生的老师。所以我们希望看到更多用户创造的词典的诞生，即不管是来自有趣的玩笑还是真正严肃的创造。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Challenges of localizing a typing game

by Urbain Bruno

In Epistory, typing is the sole interaction the player has with the game. You get to type a lot of words, in fun, varied ways, so we end up with a lot of text content. We don’t just use random words, but words that fits with several constraints (of theme and gameplay). That makes the translation work crucial for the experience of the non-english speaking players.

So let’s take a look at the main challenges we had with localizing our text-based content and the solutions we came up with.

The Story’s Script

First of all, the easiest and less interesting one, the story’s script. Well, the way the story is made is a very interesting topic (and our writer wrote an article about it). But its localization is just a regular translation.

In the game, script text is displayed as sentences scattered across in the game world, that you can read as you explore. As a result, the script looks like a list of unrelated sentences. The challenge was to give our translators a sense of how those sentences were linked together to form a whole story. We wrote comments about the context of each sentence and it worked just fine. It was particularly useful to give instructions on what was the most important aspect of the text to translate: was it the literal sense, an underlying meaning, or the style (like when there is an alliteration)?

Words to Type

Outside of the story script, our other use of text is to display prompt words. We show words alongside “interactive elements” to trigger some kind of interaction – like planting a flower or destroying a rock. Our intention was to give meaning to what you type while avoiding repetition. But we couldn’t possibly manually assign a specific word to each element. We also needed to easily control the complexity of the words used, to keep the difficulty balanced. And finally, we had to deal with languages having different word lengths and special characters.

Gameplay wise, our solution was to give to each kind of element a dictionary from which a word is picked up randomly. The dictionaries have a given theme and word length restrictions. For example, the action of creating flowers is defined as easy, and so its dictionary has words which are flower names under 8 characters. The destruction of a rock is considered harder (thus it gives more points), therefore its dictionary uses scientific names of minerals between 8 and 10 characters.

For localization, translators were asked to fill up the dictionaries using the same constraints for every language.

Several Languages in Early Access

Epistory is reaching the end of a six-month early access period, during which we added story content as well as gameplay features. All that content was available in English, German and French since the first day of early access. Spanish was also added later on.

On the one hand, it was a good thing to make early access available in several languages (at least, that’s what our German and French players said). Besides opening the game to more buyers, it allowed us to check the quality of the early access builds thanks to our most dedicated players. For example, without them, we would not have thought about creating a German-Swiss dictionary (which uses “ss” instead of “?”). One German fan even proposed to proof-read the script directly!

On the other hand, that forced us to go through translation process several times as we iterated on the script and level design, which is quite time consuming. The challenge here was to allow an easy integration on our iterative versions.

After several adaptations, we ended up with a configuration that works (surprisingly) well: the script is in an Excel document that directly exports an XML file, while the dictionaries are in a Google spreadsheet with a homemade script that exports a JSON file.

The key was to keep a limited number of languages during early access (3 more languages will come at release). But given the amount of work required to do the translation and keep it up to date, I would not recommend to do that for games with heavy text content. It is preferable to stick to English, at least until the source content is sure not to change too much.

Special Characters

All those beautiful languages have their own eccentricities and colloquialisms, and it is far from obvious to know how they are used when you don’t speak that language. What concerned us the most were the special characters (? in French, ? in German, ? in Polish…). We even have a Russian translation, which means cyrillic alphabet.

Our first approach was to work closely with professional translators in order to have a good understanding of each language. We asked a lot of questions about what special characters are used, how frequently they occur, what keyboard layouts are popular, and so on.

That information helped us set up the rules for the words that players have to type (the dictionaries). We decided that common special characters are an important enough part of a language to be conserved. But the very rare ones (that exist mostly because of etymological history) and the ones that require more than one keystroke have to be avoided. In short, we wanted to avoid any frustration from players confronted to the most complex words their native language can provide.

The other side of the problem was to display those words with a unique font. We have several fonts depending on where text is used in the game, but we did not want to change the font depending on the language. We choose the simplest solution: which was to meticulously choose the fonts we wanted and add any special characters ourselves. We had to buy a specialised software licence, but finding a good font with all the characters required would have been an almost impossible struggle.

Editable by Players

Finally, I want to add something that is not a challenge but an opportunity. We are leveraging our heavily text-based content as an advantage: it’s easy for anyone to edit and create something by just changing the dictionaries.

That’s why we will find a way to let players edit and share their own dictionaries to be used in the game. We’ve already met a teacher who wanted to use Epistory to teach foreign languages to his students. So we hope to see a lot of inspired user-created dictionaries, from the funniest jokes to the most serious creations.（source：Gamasutra）