From the archive
Lessons Learned from Localizing Canabalt
At the end of 2011 Canabalt shipped in about 15 languages, all translated by volunteers. Its designer wrote down what the studio learned.
Semi Secret is an independent publication, not the studio that made these games; this page is an unofficial account written from the public record.
Fans did the translating
It worked because the game has little text and passionate players, so volunteers could finish a language in a few hours. The studio's own cost was about two to four hours of work per language, which made smaller languages worth doing for fans in places like Finland and the Czech Republic.
The files were the hard part
Sending each translator a copy of one annotated English file was easy at the start and painful at the end: three or four working days of copying and pasting, which delayed the release by months. The plan for next time was one shared document per language with up to three editors.
Pitfalls worth knowing
- Text grows: one and a half to two lines of English became nearly three in Italian or German.
- Manual line breaks scale badly; real word wrapping saves the work later.
- A sentence with two variables needs its order encoded, or the pieces come out in the wrong order in another language.
- A file saved in the wrong text encoding can lose characters.
- A language override in the options helped players and made testing easy.
- Translators added themselves to the credits through fields in their language file, so each was credited in their own language automatically.
Did it sell more?
Not measurably, at least in the short term, and Canabalt was more than two years old by then. The studio still judged it a good idea for the fans it reached, and guessed translation matters more at launch, when stores abroad may be likelier to feature a game.