Translate FFXIV into Spanish

Hi, I know it's weird to see this here but I want to ask you something less than 5 minutes of your time, a collection of signatures has started for the translation of the game into Spanish. Since this language is the second most talked about and this videogame has not yet been translated, we have the whole saga translated and this is still so, and that with time has come many more Spanish and Latin speaking people. I hope to see some support on your part since almost all of us live in the same game that we are passionate about. All united by a cause, to take other players to know the game, that previously did not enter the language limitations and others because they understand the story better.
Thank you very much everyone and have a happy Valentine's Day.

PD: I hope that this message came to Yoshi-p , there are many people eager to see this dream come true. :o

https://www.change.org/p/square-enix...n-espa%C3%B1ol

There are a lot of countries whose first language is Spanish. I honestly don't understand why the game hasn't been translated but there must be a good reason. I mean it could attract many new players.

I also think it could have a spanish translation but they probably did not and will not consider it on their economy politics.

At the political level we do not have a law like France's that basically consists in that all multimedia content that wants to be sold in that country has to come with texts in French, here in Spain we do not have that, when that would have to be something basic to have, the second most spoken language in the world unless the texts come in Spanish and all this we have to add another problem, that if the game does not come in Spanish people will not buy it as they can do with a FFXV that If it comes in Spanish, then Square Enix does not translate the game because people do not buy and people do not buy because the game is not in Spanish. This is the serpierte that bites the queue constantly.

And so are the players that if we support the title trying to get the games independently if it is offline play as online in our language, if it will be put in Spanish and players are going to shoot, they are already entering a lot of players from speak spanish / latin, imagine when i am in that language.

Signed, although I have splitting opinions about a full translation mainly because I know about the eternal debate between Latin-America spanish and European spanish, some people might say, "FF14 uses british english actors mostly, ere it should mirror that in spanish" but holy muffins one cannot underestimate how much this spanish irks latin-hispanic people.

But heck if I wouldnt volunteer to squex to help with the translations to spanish

We're here SQUEX, we try helping english nonspeakers through this great game, through new spanish video guides or latin fc even when the drama levels are telenovela worthy, and its sad to see them leave because they cannot stay in a game with a B2 language level required.

Heres hoping I will see soon some "Fuego, Fuego +, Fuego ++, Lazaro, etc" Spells.

Done, and good luck ^^

For favooooooooor, junto con eso se agregaría mucha gente nueva y con eso. Posiblemente evento en Chile. Si no. Solo con tenerlo en español sería hermoso.

My friend stopped playing ff 14 because it wasn't translated. So maybe in the future we can get subs in spanish at least.

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Originally Posted by kruky

At the political level we do not have a law like France's that basically consists in that all multimedia content that wants to be sold in that country has to come with texts in French.

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I would like you to cite when this law was voted, because I doubt it exists. To name a few, Theatrhythm (normal and Curtain call) were released without any translation whatsoever and these games are younger than FFXIV (especially version 1, when the French and German translations were decided).

The only law I am aware of that sounds like that is a Quebec one saying that if a French version is released somewhere, then it must be released in Quebec as well.

I believe this was asked at the first Fanfest (2014). I know I did, and someone did as well (they managed to catch Koji-Fox on the floor). Basically, they didn't see it as profitable to translate the game regardless of how many people actually speak Spanish. Sad, I know, but it was what their response back then was.

It's a shame though, since many players can "get by" playing in English, but they really lose out on a lot of the experience when it comes to lore and the meaning behind certain names/places.

Here's to hoping this thread/petition will get them to reconsider. And I know that myself, as well as others, would be happy to assist in translation:D

Traducción pequeña de lo de arriba: Preguntaron sobre este tema en el Fanfest 2014. La respuesta informal fue que, aunque reconocen que hay mucha gente hispanoparlante, económicamente no está en sus mejores intereses traducir el juego. Tendrían que lidiar con el tema de la traducción (osea ocupar personas bilingues certificados en traducción), ocupar actores para las voces, y ocupar personas para manejar los foros y ayuda en general al cliente.

In that year I understand that it has been said but it has been 4 years of that and the game has triumphed now and what is left to succeed if they put it in another language such as Spanish, as has been said in a previous post, there are people who stop playing for the language, although they love to stop playing because they lose certain plot thread, and prefer to pay for something that is in their language, see the world of warcraft or Guild Wars 2 since its release was in Spanish.

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Originally Posted by Yasminou

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Look up "Toubon Law". Although there are certain situations when a company can get away with not using French Language, as a whole it is a major requirement in many forms of media in order to protect the language.

Public owned companies are expected to fully translate and/or dub works if necessary whilst private companies have to provide French has an option to choose from for the consumer.

Yes I agree they should revisit the issue. I just won't be surprised if their answer is the same.

Half the problem imo is the fact that a lot of Latin American countries don't have easy access to credit/debit cards. It's much easier in these countries to buy game/time cards at gas stations/Walmart etc. But at least here in the US, I have not ever seen one of those time cards for FFXIV. I see Steam/World of Warcraft/League everywhere, though. Payment management options needs to come from SE, and as it is right now, you can't even use PayPal to pay for your sub. XD

It's an uphill battle for sure but I definitely support the community's wish to have the game in Spanish.

I travel a lot back to my country, while it is a nice concept in certain areas it would be one hell of an expensive game. Think of it this way. Certain parts of latin america 1 US dollar is = 10-11 pesos. On average a person can make around 80 pesos a day. for lowest tier. To make it profitable it would be around the same price of 40 US dollars at a minimum. Not to mention subscription fee and internet providers. While it is a great idea in the long run it may not be as popular based on price. Rent alone can range around 3200 pesos and up. So it would hit them economically. Kind of how in the US we import Japanese games or Asian games in English we see it as no big deal. Currency wise it is different in other countries.

I know many people who would play if the game were Spanish, in my case I have an intermediate level of English and the level of difficulty of the texts in the game is very advanced and sometimes I find it very difficult to follow the stories and content of the game and I completely lose the immersion.

I support the cause of translating the texts into Spanish, hopefully we will wake up SE and make them recognize that there is a large community of Spanish-speaking players waiting at the door to enjoy the game.

Three years ago I played free trial for 15 days and like the game, but it was too confusing to me. One year ago, I tried again cause my friends kept recommended it and finally love it. If you want more spanish players, you need to translate it! I really want to recommend it like others did to me.

I signed the petition and share it into Facebook.
My English skill is medium/high, but I have problems with some accents that the characters use. It's not easy.
About is not profitable, well, WoW its translated into Spanish since the beginning, and a few years ago they even provide a Latin Spanish version (Before that patch, Latin Spanish people played with Spain dubs and text). (So should be profitable if they did that)
We only need the text, nothing more. I will play with Japanese voices anyways XD And we are used to subtitles. Companies rarely dub games in Spain. We are used to it, and it's not a problem at all.
I know many people that not play this game because it's not translated.
Please Square Enix, do it! D:

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Originally Posted by faris_minamino

I signed the petition and share it into Facebook.
My English skill is medium/high, but I have problems with some accents that the characters use. It's not easy.
About is not profitable, well, WoW its translated into Spanish since the beginning, and a few years ago they even provide a Latin Spanish version (Before that patch, Latin Spanish people played with Spain dubs and text). (So should be profitable if they did that)
We only need the text, nothing more. I will play with Japanese voices anyways XD And we are used to subtitles. Companies rarely dub games in Spain. We are used to it, and it's not a problem at all.
I know many people that not play this game because it's not translated.
Please Square Enix, do it! D:

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My friend and mine have a project that we are working right now. We are doing a translator app for ffxiv. I can show you a little teaser so you can check it. I have zero idea about quality of the translation but you can tell me about it. It has a lot of languages, we are testing it on russian. Let me know if it's interesting for not-native speakers. We are planning to post it on Reddit when it will be ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJWQEd3z3I

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Originally Posted by xDarkOne

My friend and mine have a project that we are working right now. We are doing a translator app for ffxiv. I can show you a little teaser so you can check it. I have zero idea about quality of the translation but you can tell me about it. It has a lot of languages, we are testing it on russian. Let me know if it's interesting for not-native speakers. We are planning to post it on Reddit when it will be ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJWQEd3z3I

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Can you tell me the name of the app? Or is it an app which is being made by you? It looks more or less fine, but more testing would be awesome! Does it only translate the texts from the cutscenes or is it able to translate everything?

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Originally Posted by xDarkOne

My friend and mine have a project that we are working right now. We are doing a translator app for ffxiv. I can show you a little teaser so you can check it. I have zero idea about quality of the translation but you can tell me about it. It has a lot of languages, we are testing it on russian. Let me know if it's interesting for not-native speakers. We are planning to post it on Reddit when it will be ready.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJWQEd3z3I

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That's actually great! Is this automated translation?
I've lost all hope in an official Spanish translation. I can understand the lore, but I got friends that aren't so great at English, and just know enough to get by in a Business environment, and it's sad to see them skip the cutscenes. It breaks my heart when they do that. This game's lore is great.

I've been playing for 5 years, and as a spanish player I've seen a looooot of people leave the game because they didn't understand the english in the game, and many others wouldn't joing because it's in english too.
I know Yoshida said in a interview this year or last year, can't remember, that they want someone that can speak both japanese and spanish to work with them and translate the game, but there's a lot of people like that living in japan (I have several friends that had been living there for years), I don't think it's THAT difficult to find someone if they wanted to :/

Yeah, I really don't see why they couldn't at least add a Spanish-language text option.

Far fewer people involved and a lot less money when you cut the dubbing out of it, and just hire a translation and localization team. Less of a data burden as well. I realize that financially the market for Spanish speaking countries isn't nearly as lucrative as the English language market when a lot of the world's 500 million Spanish speakers live below the poverty line in third world countries, but it's gotta be at least as large as the German-language market. Spanish would also make the game a bit more accessible to Italian and Portuguese speakers, neither of which are insignificant (Brazil alone has 62 million active gamers per Google).

IIRC the reason stated somewhere on the forums here on why there wasn't a Spanish translation at first was because they just didn't have a localisation and voice-acting team ready back during 2.0 and that currently it would be an insane amount of backlog work to localise (which goes a few notches above just translating, see Haurchefant as an example). Silly reason probably, but that is what I recall reading on earlier incarnations of the same request as yours.

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Originally Posted by Valenth

IIRC the reason stated somewhere on the forums here on why there wasn't a Spanish translation at first was because they just didn't have a localisation and voice-acting team ready back during 2.0 and that currently it would be an insane amount of backlog work to localise (which goes a few notches above just translating, see Haurchefant as an example). Silly reason probably, but that is what I recall reading on earlier incarnations of the same request as yours.

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I would gladly cooperate in a free of charge collaboration project to translate dialogues and text from the game to Spanish if SE uses it to at least have a full Spanish text version of FFXIV. I'm sure 99% of us wouldn't care if we, Spanish speaking people, lack of spanish voice acting in the game.

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Originally Posted by Mirania

I would gladly cooperate in a free of charge collaboration project to translate dialogues and text from the game to Spanish if SE uses it to at least have a full Spanish text version of FFXIV. I'm sure 99% of us wouldn't care if we, Spanish speaking people, lack of spanish voice acting in the game.

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Yeah, we keep saying this every time someone brings up voice acting.
Just translating the text is fine, and it's already a huge task, but not impossible.
It's been 5 years since I've started playing, so I'm not keeping my hopes up.

I just hope they do translate their next MMO into more languages.
I'm sure it's the story leaking what they're worried about, so it may be a good idea to start
looking for a team soon.

Regarding the above project, if you need help translating to Spanish, or just someone to proof read, hit me up.

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Originally Posted by Dread13

Can you tell me the name of the app? Or is it an app which is being made by you? It looks more or less fine, but more testing would be awesome! Does it only translate the texts from the cutscenes or is it able to translate everything?

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The name of the app is - Tataru Helper.
You can find it on github - https://github.com/NightlyRevenger/TataruHelper
It can translate everything from chat window actually. You can choose chatcodes that you need to translate.
We are testing it right now on russians (we are russians actually :D)
We will release it on reddit soon when we will make design for a website :D
Soon tm

My respects.

Hello Yoshi-P, any news regarding translating the game into more languages? Now with the future release of the game in Xbox the sales will improve a lot, I hope that thanks to this new entry of players you can think of officially translating the game . Greetings to you and to all who make this game possible.

At this point I'd assume its largely an issue of there being a metric crapton of text that needs to be translated at this point. That would be a pretty large undertaking.

We need more people to coment in the forums if we want this to go somewhere, but sadly spanish community barely uses the forums due to language barrier :(
At least the new videos of the Shadowbringers creation are translated in spanish!

The reason is it cost money to translate.
French and German got a translation because their countries have laws preventing the sale of a game if it doesn't have their language.
Meanwhile Spanish speaking countries are nicer and do not have such laws. Is one of those things that being an a-hole pays. While being nice gets you screwed.

Please translate the game to Spanish, a lot of my friends refuse to play the game because it's not available in Spanish.

+1

I don't see the issue, to be honest. English -> Japanese or vice versa, I get how difficult that is. These are two very different languages, with very different roots, and some things just do not translate across - therefore the translator needs to be intimately involved with the original writers, so that when there is no direct translation, the writers can come up with a similar sentiment in the destination language.

However, since an English translation already exists, there are very, very few things that won't translate directly across from English to Spanish. A few, sure, but a pittance compared to the things that won't translate directly across from Japanese to English.

So, then, the work amounts to not a whole lot more than translating a popular English novel into Spanish. That's done all day, every day, and the people that do it don't really make loads of money. I mean, the money is good, but it's not costing anyone millions of dollars to translate the latest Stephen King into Spanish. The one or two people that do it probably make a good five figures a year, not more. (And Googling this, I was almost right, the top pay exceeds $100k by a smidge, but the average is around $75k, and starters can earn half of that.)

As to the European vs. Latin American Spanish, I'm afraid that LA would win out, just by the numbers. However, once someone has an LA Spanish translation in hand, further localization to European Spanish would be that much easier.

Solo mis dos centavos. Hablo Espanol como un guero (LOL), pero es porque lo aprendi todo con solo vivir 30 anos en Los Angeles, y casado con Mexicana durante treinta anos tambien. Y... un poco de DuoLingo. Jejeje.

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Originally Posted by Breakbeat

So, then, the work amounts to not a whole lot more than translating a popular English novel into Spanish. That's done all day, every day, and the people that do it don't really make loads of money. I mean, the money is good, but it's not costing anyone millions of dollars to translate the latest Stephen King into Spanish. The one or two people that do it probably make a good five figures a year, not more. (And Googling this, I was almost right, the top pay exceeds $100k by a smidge, but the average is around $75k, and starters can earn half of that.)

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Well for starters, there's a LOT more text than the average Stephen King book to translate, even compared to like The Stand. This is a nearly decade old game with all sorts of text to be translated from story to incidental quests and NPC dialogue to item descriptions. On top of that, you have to get and retain a pretty good sized cast of voice actors to voice all the various characters throughout the game which likely isn't cheap either.

That said it certainly would be cool if they did translate it. I wonder if it's an issue of comparing costs to potential gains or what.

Yeah, agreed on both counts, there's probably more like a 'series of novels' worth of text, and I hadn't thought of the voice acting. With text translation, it's simply a matter of time for the person to be done with the job. Aside from clarifying things that don't directly translate, the bulk of the work can be done by the translator alone. But with voice acting, there will need to be a lot of involvement between the actors and writers, producers, and directors, so that the voice and persona - the essence, if you will - of the character match the artist's vision.

Definitely, cost vs. return would be major consideration, if not the deciding factor. So, unfortunately, as easy and/or cheap as I or anyone else thinks it would be, there's a simple formula of costs vs. returns, and if the gaming market in country X doesn't make that bottom line light up green, it's not happening.

I say there's hope, though. WoW has a Spanish version, and I am sure Blizz' formula for "do we localize to country X?" is reasonably similar to SE's. We're growing by leaps and bounds here, and we might soon hit the mark where they greenlight more localization. I am sure Spanish is near the top or at the top of that list.

France and Germany have law prohibiting the sale of software that does not have a translation to their languages.
Unfortunately Spain does not have such law. So Square didn't bother with a language that a lot of countries speak.

Want the next FF to have Spanish translation? Push for Spain and Mexico to add a law requiring software to have a Spanish translation in order to be sold in the country. Until that happens Square doesn't care.