> Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.
I'm pretty sure much more than 20% of the world's population is fluent in English. It's the language of the western world and the global economy, after all.
> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
Like the market ever cared about distributed failures like these. Every studio uses a different translation group, they can't really verify the final product, and the translators will happily save money doing shoddy work. Not to mention, the workflow isn't usually optimized for correct translations. To do this right, you'd have to have the translation team play through the entire game at least once to understand the whole picture, and only then have them work together on translating the text and audio. No single-pass translations, and no dividing the work between multiple people that don't talk to each other. I.e. more expensive. At the same time, the studio will get 90% of the profit (which happens at the point of sale, not at the completion of the experience) with a shitty translation anyway.
I'm pretty sure much more than 20% of the world's population is fluent in English. It's the language of the western world and the global economy, after all.
> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
Like the market ever cared about distributed failures like these. Every studio uses a different translation group, they can't really verify the final product, and the translators will happily save money doing shoddy work. Not to mention, the workflow isn't usually optimized for correct translations. To do this right, you'd have to have the translation team play through the entire game at least once to understand the whole picture, and only then have them work together on translating the text and audio. No single-pass translations, and no dividing the work between multiple people that don't talk to each other. I.e. more expensive. At the same time, the studio will get 90% of the profit (which happens at the point of sale, not at the completion of the experience) with a shitty translation anyway.