Guild Wars 2

I know it is a very limited public and perhaps arenanet itself should not be spending time and/or resources on it. Yet I have some friends (native dutch speakers) who have little knowledge of other languages. It would be cool if there was some way I could create a dutch gw2 story-experience for them. Perhaps a way we can translate it ourselves for these people and make it available through a plugin of some sort reviewed and approved by arenanet?

Let me know your thoughts.
PS. Only constructive comments nothing like ‘ooh let them learn another language’ because thats not why they are here!

I’d gladly help…. But there should be a way how we could provide the translations beforee patches….. without having a lot of spoilers… (I like the game fresh as well…)

Well, games are almost never translated to Dutch. For the simple reason: Its not worth the time.

Almost everyone who can speak Dutch can also speak English. So it is not worth it to spend tons of money just to translate it to Dutch for only a very small amount of people.

I know mech thats why i’m suggesting the community being able to create it for themselves. If we can do that for dutch we can do it for almost any language

I’d also be happy to provide allot of the translations for no charge what so ever.

I think making the game for a wider audience would be an awesome thing and I’m absolutely all for it.

However, there are so many associated costs with translating a game. I get the feeling that business-wise, the costs aren’t worth it. Not only would they have to translate all current content, but all future content, updates and balances too. There would have to be a support team able to operate in the language and even wiki translations and a separate language forum. So, costs would have to cover a permanent CS/moderation team, extra servers for websites, an ongoing translation.

A community/fan translation would bypass some of the cost, but at the same time would be very difficult to maintain or complete, considering the sheer amount of text that needs to be translated and the amount of small changes that happen with each update. How would the translation make its way in-game? The only way I can really think of it happening would be through some sort of overlay or mod as I can’t imagine a community translation being put into the game by A-net themselves.

As what’s been said above… I understand that some Dutchies won’t be able to understand the languages currently available… but a lot of them do. Most speak reasonable English (the ones I’ve met through GW2 speak wonderful English!) and I understand that many also can understand German and French, depending on region.

I’ve also found that most ESL folk prefer to play games in English; translations often feel awkward or clunky. A Dutch translation would have a very small user-base compared to other non-supported languages (think the Cyrillic languages, as an example).

I could contribute by translating dialog to Southern Californian.

Me: “Dude?”
NPC: “Dude”
Me: “Dude!”
NPC: “No way!”
Me: “Totally way!”

Basically there is a point of diminishing returns. If, oh, 70% use language A, 20% use language B, and the rest divy up that final 10% eventually you reach a point where the # of potential players x what they will spend is greater than the translation costs.

That being said, it would be nice for players to be able to contribute translations. The ‘easiest’ way is an area at the bottom for subtitles then you could drop in modules for whatever language.