Steampunk Road Dispatch

You may have noticed the foreign languages at the bottom of the home screen of Steampunk Road: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese. If you select one of these languages, you will see most of the menus in that language.

We write “most” because far from all of Steampunk Road has been translated. Our translation method consists of putting words and phrases into Google Translate and then working back and forth between English and the other language until we appear to have a stable translation. We are still not certain about “Russian”, a surprisingly difficult word to translate into Russian. And ask us sometime about the joys of trying to write Cyrillic in PHP.

We would like to add Chinese to the list, but we decided to stick to languages that 1) we could actually see their words’ connection to their English counterparts, and that 2) read from left to right. We don’t want to end up like all of those people with tattoos on the Internet who have no idea what they really say.

In short, translation is a very time-consuming task. We can not afford to purchase help from a translation service. So our choices are: English-only, the time-consuming Google Translate and a limited number of languages, or volunteers. If you have a passion for translation and want to help out in the language of your choice, drop us a line at translate@steampunkroad.com. Thanks!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 20th, 2013 at 10:54 PM and is filed under About the Game, Opportunities To Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.