Good news, after much urging Frontier Developments to fulfill their promise to localize Elite: Dangerous into Spanish, today Michael Brookes, executive producer, has given the green light to the creation of a working group to start the translation of the game, which will be carried out by the Hispanic gaming community itself.
A few months ago, in August 2014, FDev promised in its newsletter 34 that it would localize the game to a lot of languages, including Spanish. Time passed, the game was launched and we still didn’t know anything about the translation, which caused some discomfort among Spanish-speaking players who bought it trusting that it would be translated. A month ago, Viajero, one of the moderators of the official Spanish forum of Elite: Dangerous, opened a new thread in the English forum reminding FDev of his promise and in which many players have been posting to join the petition and offering to collaborate in the localization in a disinterested way for the good of the Hispanic community.
Finally from FDev they have picked up the baton and have accepted the offer of collaboration from the community, aware that no one better than the players themselves, who are the ones who know the game best, to locate it properly. The game has already been translated into German, French and Russian, but players from these countries have complained about the poor quality of the translations, made by translation agencies that do not know the game so well. Spanish will be the first to be localized by the community itself.
This is what Michael Brookes has said on the official forums (thanks to him for the translation):
Hey,
Since we launched the game we have wanted to make Elite: Dangerous available in several languages. At the moment we have located French, German and Russian. When we have used translation agencies, we have realized that they are not close enough to the game to give it the right tone and accuracy for each language within the game. We are very interested in making high-quality localizations for Elite: Dangerous in a wide variety of languages, even in cases where the number of players is relatively small. We thought that the community could be very well prepared to help us with this, so we would like to try an experiment with the Spanish version incorporating the translations provided by the community. We hope that this way we can learn how to expand the method to other languages in the future.
I have discussed with the moderators how to proceed with this, and the first step is to see who would like to take part. Viajero will shortly create a thread for volunteers to sign up (he will also post a translation of this post). We would need translators and verifiers, so please indicate in that thread which of these tasks you are interested in, and you can do both if you want! It would also be useful to know how many groups or batches of text you could translate, but that is not essential at the moment since we would only send a single batch at a time to the people who participate. At the moment, the game has 210,000 words (not including GalNet and the Community Objectives, which are added weekly) so we are going to divide the task into batches of 1,000 words to translate and verify. We will provide you with more information about the process when we are ready to start.
Post here if you have any comments, but leave the registration thread exclusively for people signing up for the initiative.
Thank you!
Michael
Those who want to collaborate in the translation or in the verification of texts can sign up in this thread of the official forum to create the working group.
