Translation Woes

A while ago I mentioned how I had created translation grids for the rules for all my games to make it easier for volunteers to translate the rules of my games into other languages. It seems to have worked. I've had a lot of translations done of my rules and this week I've received a couple more (Sumeria into Hungarian and Carpe Astra into Spanish).

So far all well and good. The translation grids work a treat, and make the layout of a new version pretty straightforward. Until everything goes wrong!

Several weeks ago I received a translation of Carpe Astra into Russian. Great! The same guy (thanks Yegor!) had done the other games too, and I'd already done Sumeria, so I started on Carpe Astra.

The translation grids make it really easy to just drop the translated text into the original Adobe InDesign document, using the same images and fonts. At least they do until you pick a stupid font. I'd used Agency FB Condensed, a narrow font that looked vaguely sci-fi, for the Carpe Astra rulebook and cards. Sadly this font did not support the cyrillic alphabet - when I pasted the translated text into the document all I got was little empty rectangular boxes where each character should have been. So I switched to Arial (it's not that important that the font is correct after all).

While this fixed the initial problem (Arial supports the cyrillic alphabet) it's a much wider font than Agency FB Condensed and the Russian translation was normally longer than the corresponding English text - so the translation no longer fits in the same number of pages. My first attempt at fixing this was to drop the font size from 12 point down to 11 (and fix all the layout problems this caused). But after a bit more cut-and-paste it was clear that 11pt wasn't small enough so I went down to 10pt (and fixed all the layout problems again). Guess what? Still not small enough. Running out of patience I shelved the translation and I admit it has been a few weeks since I last made any progress.

The arrival of the new translation grids forced me to go back to it however, and today I finally nailed it. The solution was finding out that InDesign allows you to change the width of a font - effectively allowing me to create an 'Arial Condensed' - a narrower version of Arial. This meant I could change the font size back to 11pt and nail it. It still took a bunch of work and a lot of fiddling to get the diagrams and their captions laid out correctly but the job is finished and off to the translator for proof-reading. This means I can concentrate on the other two translations over the weekend.

The moral of this tale? I'm not really sure, other than learn the abilities of InDesign so that I can fix this problem the right way first time!

Take The Blue Pill

God alone know what the title's going to do to the Goggle ads. I've been receiving emails for some time with that advice and I've finally taken them up on it.

Yesterday morning I went over to the hospital at Cambridge about my gammy eye. Unlike the hospital in York (3 miles from our flat there), the Cambridge hospital is 45 miles away, so The Wife had to take the morning off work too to give me a lift there (since my gammy eye is stopping me from driving at the moment)- thanks! I was expecting them to say: 'You've had too many treatments recently to receive any more steroids', but they prescribed me some again. Yeay! Unfortunately, they've given me some little blue pills to take instead of the IV treatment I usually get. These pills taste foul, by some length the worst thing I've ever tasted, and I've got to have five a day for five days :-( Still, my vision is improving already, so it's not all bad.

Today I'll be making the final corrections to the Carpe Astra and Sumeria German rules and getting them both up on my website. The competition seems to be continuing well, I'm not yet sure whether it's having any affect on sales, but by the end of the month (even if I've not had any re-orders from my stocking distributors) the consignment returns should indicate whether there's been a spike in sales or not.

My games have gone off the boil on BoardGameGeek a bit, with Carpe Astra dropping to fourth in The Hotness list, Sumeria is still in seventh and It's Alive! now way down the list. Also, my company has dropped from first to second. I've been surprised how much higher Carpe Astra has been in the list than It's Alive! throughout the competition, I guess fewer people had heard of Carpe Astra, so it got more click-throughs.

In other news, when I asked about free publicity, W. Eric Martin from Boardgame News gave me a chance to write a piece for BGN about game submissions to publishers. That's going to run tomorrow, so I'd imagine I'll be getting a few submissions fairly soon.

Polyglot Games

My Belgian distributor wants to translate Carpe Astra into Dutch. Cool! I thought I'd use this as an excuse for a discussion of languages in games.

It's Alive! is a language-independent game. The only text is on the rules, player aids and the box, the game components feature nothing but numbers on the cards. As such, it's prime translation material. Numerous customers have translated the rules into their own languages: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Japanese. When I did the second version, I got Michael (thanks, Michael!) to translate the rules, box and player aids into German, so I had a multi-lingual version. This was especially useful for trying to break into the large German market, but also at Essen.

Michael sent me his translation in the form of a 'translation grid', where each sentence or caption on a diagram was in a separate box with the German translation alongside. This was a really useful way of clearly showing me which bits of the German translation corresponded with which bits of the English rules - making it easy for me to layout the German text with the diagrams correctly.

When it was time to do Carpe Astra I chose to do a single language version only due to the large quantities of English text on each card. Although the text on the card wasn't really necessary (it's a combination of an English language description of the diagrams on the top half of the card and some flavour text which has no in-game effect), I figured it would detract from a German version if the only thing you got in German was the rules, everything else was in English only. As a result - mono-lingual game :-(

However, things are now moving along. The Dutch translator asked if I could provide the text in a form that was easy to edit. Since I had done the rules layout in InDesign, and he didn't have access to that package I offered to send him a translation grid. Then it struck me. Why not provide the translation grids for my games on my website? It will allow people to easily translate the rules into their own languages if they want, which only helps me. The Carpe Astra one is up now, the It's Alive! one will follow later today.

In other news, I'm in negotiations now with another publisher to do another version of It's Alive! in another language, hopefully that will bear fruit in a few months time.

It's Alive! Italian Rules Up

This evening after my course finished I posted the Italian rules for It's Alive! on my website.

One of my Italian customers offered to write them, and post them on La Tana dei Goblin which is apparently the premier board games site in Italy. I told him that was fine, but I'd like to post them on my website too. Which brings up some interesting questions:

1. Did I make any errors converting the PDF to HTML?
2. Has he made any spelling, grammatical or punctuation errors?
3. Is it a fair translation?

Speaking no Italian, I've no idea about the answers to any of these questions. Google Language Tools can help a little with question three. The quality of the translaton back into English is pretty flaky, but it's good enough to understand that the content is basically the same.

How do I answer questions one and two though? The best I can think of for one is to get the original translator to check my format conversion, and two is to hope that I can find another Italian speaker willing to check. Without any budget to spend on this, I think these ideas are the best I can hope for.

Anyone speak Italian? I'd appreciate a second pair of eyes.

In other news, I've had an offer from one of last week's two Japanese customers to translate the rules into Japanese. That would be an even harder language to check! I'd also appreciate it if anyone else wants to translate the rules into their first language, all I ask is that you include the copyright notice, and let me post your translation (attributed to you with a link) on my website.