We Need traditional Chinese translation for this game..

[Yevra]

First of all I apologize for bringing up this topic under English localization, but apparently this is the only place I can reach out to the developers about this issue.

I 'm aware that there is already a Chinese version of the game(which is the China server) but that's not what I'm talking about.

For those who're not aware of this, there's simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese are used in China and the traditional Chinese are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Their differences are just like the US English and UK English.

we all know that the China server is separated from the global server due to the county's strict game policy:
all games in China must have a registration key issued by their government, you must have a China ID and phone number to play the game, play time limit system must be installed to restrict playtime for underage players etc.
So other than their patch isn't up to date as the global server's, the China server are basically only for people from China only. And as I mentioned before, it's in simplified Chinese.

There are players that use traditional Chinese from all over the world struggling to understand the game, yet still loves it and willing to play the story in foreign language, then watch a translated version of the story again to understand it. So I really hope the development team will take this into consideration, and hopefully in the near future we get to play the game in a language we know and understand, just like all the players that understand ENG/JP/French and German language.

[DrWho2010]

at this point in the games lifecycle there is simply too much material both text and voice that you will never see another language added to support the game. anything new that could possibly be added would mean that everything from the beginning would have to be added/voiced and that's just something that's not going to happen. time vs. cost that sort of thing.

[Shurrikhan]

at this point in the games lifecycle there is simply too much material both text and voice that you will never see another language added to support the game. anything new that could possibly be added would mean that everything from the beginning would have to be added/voiced and that's just something that's not going to happen. time vs. cost that sort of thing.

What's being requested more closely require the label of swapping font, or moving from British to American spellings, than adding a new language. He's not asking for a Cantonese dub, just traditional characters.

Also, weren't there hints at a Spanish localization being in the works?

[DrWho2010]

What's being requested more closely require the label of swapping font, or moving from British to American spellings, than adding a new language. He's not asking for a Cantonese dub, just traditional characters.

Also, weren't there hints at a Spanish localization being in the works?

There never was any hint of any spanish localization. And they're not going to not include voice if they're adding new language text either.

[Shurrikhan]

And they're not going to not include voice if they're adding new language text either.

Same language, at least in writing; different script / typography.

It's like if North America decided 65 years ago, for the purposes of easing literacy, to switch over to entirely phonetic (around a given common dialect) spelling. Britain and Australia still have the older forms of spelling, which takes longer to learn but keeps the meanings of words (like "fónetik" -- phonetic) more obvious due to their still being spelled consistently from a given semantic root (be that German, Norse, Latin, Greek, or whatever else). Now, SE's localization only uses those new North American spellings, since they cover the majority of native English speakers, even though those spellings can be baffling to British and Australian players.

This is asking for those alternate, more understandable spellings.

It is not a hard ask.

[DrWho2010]

isn't the difference here we're talking about like between Cantonese and Mandarin? the two ways they're voiced are completely different.

[Shurrikhan]

isn't the difference here we're talking about like between Cantonese and Mandarin? the two ways they're voiced are completely different.

How they're voiced has no impact on the written language in this case. The scripts have nothing to do with the pronunciation. I merely used varying spellings as an example because it's the closest analog we could manage with English.

You can read 你好 as nĭ hăo or néih-hóu, but the characters will still have the same meaning; the pronunciation is dialect-dependent, but also irrelevant when writing to one another. The two languages were mutually intelligible in (and only in) their writing until the majority of mainland China swapped to simplified characters (a way to save time in writing and ease literacy). Traditional Chinese =/= Cantonese. It simply happens that Hong Kong, for instance, has not swapped to simplified characters, and therefore reading the much-trimmed Simplified Chinese writing will often be to them like trying to understand your friend's shorthand notes. That they speak Cantonese would only matter in voice-over, which is beyond the OP's request here.

If I set my IME to Mandarin and then type 'nihao' and hit space, it appears as 你好, meaning hello. If I swap to Cantonese and type 'neihou' and hit space, it appears as 你好, meaning hello. That phrase is identical in both Traditional and Simplified. I just type it in either dialect, turn it into the any-dialect characters, and voila.

But now let's say I want to type "cat". In a Mandarin IME, I could type 'mao' in Traditional, hit space (or maybe button 1-6 or so, if that's not the first character with the same pronunciation in Mandarin that the IME guesses I want), and it's 貓. Or I could type 'mao' in Simplified and its 猫. That one's alike enough not to be confusing. But that's not the majority...

Now take, for instance, dragon -- 龍 or 龙. They look nothing alike, and all the meaning-attributing parts of the original character have been simplified into shape-setting strokes, as if I'd just typed "dn" instead, forgoing all implication of actual meaning. Or, heck, let's take the name for Canton itself, 廣(州) in Traditional but 广(州) in Simplified. The whole meaning element under the enclosing radical was trimmed away.

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Let's put it another way:

I can take a string of text in a word document written in Simplified Chinese and basically font-swap it to Traditional. That's the extent of the request here.

[DrWho2010]

Let's put it another way:

I can take a string of text in a word document written in Simplified Chinese and basically font-swap it to Traditional. That's the extent of the request here.

That may be the extent of the request, but I'm saying you're not going to get text only changes without voice overs also being added.

[Avenger]

I agree it seems like it should be relatively less work to do a font swap, but nothing is ever easy in software development. In the case of fonts it isn't just the UI but also texture representations on screen, in chat boxes,on maps, etc.. It still has to be tested to make sure it is legible and that no other errors have occurred.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm saying you're not going to get text only changes without voice overs also being added.

Why? They're literally detached in every localization. I can play with Japanese text and English voices just as easily as both English, both Japanese, or the inverse. There's no reason by which we'd be prevented from adding one without the other.

It's effectively a difference in font. Give the option to swap it at almost zero effort and suddenly you have many millions more who can read your game.