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Question for people who read Chinese / are familiar with Chinese game translations:

I see a lot of games where traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese have separate translators. I don't know enough about Chinese dialects to know whether this is the game being translated into separate dialects, or if something else is being adapted here (beyond the script). Is it usually one script with adaptations? Entirely separate scripts? This is a blind spot for me I'd love to know more about.


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in reply to @dog's post:

its usually one script with adaptations afaik. traditional chinese would be either for taiwan or canton regions and they both have some differences to mainland common word usage.(but not enough to warrant entirely different scripts) (and also differences between themselves, too, idk how they account for that)

That makes sense, thank you!

Yeah, I wonder if the difference between traditional Chinese regions is handled like Canada/France French, Brazil/Portugal Portuguese, Mexico/Spain Spanish - eg most games don't bother with variants for both, but some games with big enough budgets will.

So, if the target markets are “the general mainland one” and “Taiwan”, the difference in vocabulary and grammar is comparable to American and British English; one script with some culturally sensitive adjustments should be fine. (“Bathroom” vs “water closet” type stuff, or the polite term of address for a young lady waitress in Taiwan being slang for a sex worker on the mainland.) If you specifically want an edition of the script that comes across as Very Cantonese or Very Hakka or some other non-official Chinese dialect, you’d need heavier adaptations approaching the effort of porting from Spanish to Italian.

Also note: automatically converting characters from traditional to simplified is more accurate than the other direction, because some simplified characters are actually a merge of two visually similar traditional characters. Simplified->traditional automatic conversion can create things like “She brushed out her long, shiny black dispatch…” It’s not something that’s going to happen every third word, but over the course of a large script it will probably happen occasionally.