Dark pine trees against a mountainous grey background.

Whatever the Wind Brings

Please, don't use "AI" to translate your game

I already wrote a long-ass article explaining why what is called "AI" by our technocrat overlords will never be intelligent, become sentient, or do a job as good as a human person born of flesh.

This is a reminder that it cannot do a good job at translating too. It does not understand context, subtlety, turn of phrases, cultural reference, and so on. It might seem ok when you throw a few paragraphs in it, but if try to use it for real work in a game with dozens or hundreds of thousands of words, the cracks become all too apparent.

And don't give me "just pay translators to edit it for quality and it's all good". Every good translation that I've seen come out of a machine was actually almost fully rewritten by a human, which means the translator was underpaid to translate from scratch and without a human proofreader in the process, always with a deadline so short that even speed readers would have trouble keeping up while reading critically and making decisions to fix bad writing.

It's also doubly-important to consider that a narrative-heavy game that goes through an LLM will come out with an average, flavorless translation, because LLMs are averaging machines. They could be great for analyzing text. Analyzing text, not analyzing writing or the meaning of its content. They were not made to create text from scratch, unless the objective is to have the most milquetoast writing possible and think that's ok.

If you are a non-native English speaker and want your game to reach a wider audience, pay a human to translate it to English. If you have the funds, pay for a Chinese translation too, also made by a human. Then, if you make enough money, start going through the list of the other most-spoken languages in the gaming world. It's better to have a game with a quality translation in 3 languages (if you're neither a Chinese or English speaker) than to have a bad translation in 50+ languages.

Trust me, people will notice.

We are all under financial pressure from the powers that be but, in creative fields, there are no shortcuts.

#"ai" #llm #localization