Pix'N Love's History of Rayman Unofficial Translation!

[OCG]

So, why is that illegal? I do not object to the deletion of translations, but I would like to know why.

Because official English translation is planned by Pix'N Love to be released at some point.
If there was no plans for English translation by company than fan translation would be fair use.

[Harpic fraîcheur]

'kay. Thanks, OGC. I hope it will be released shortly for English people!

[Eshap]

I'm not that knowledgeable in copyright, but that doesn't sound like the real reason, unless I've missed something in the thread.
As much as I would love a translation of the book, putting the translation up is essentially putting the book's contents online for free, just in a different language. If one were so inclined, they could run the English translation through a translator and get the French version for free, albeit in choppier form. Since you need to pay for the book to get the content, this sounds pretty illegal, even if an English translation is being planned...

Also, the amount of disrespect towards the publishers here makes me very sad.

[OCG]

I'm not that knowledgeable in copyright, but that doesn't sound like the real reason, unless I've missed something in the thread.
As much as I would love a translation of the book, putting the translation up is essentially putting the book's contents online for free, just in a different language. If one were so inclined, they could run the English translation through a translator and get the French version for free, albeit in choppier form. Since you need to pay for the book to get the content, this sounds pretty illegal, even if an English translation is being planned...

Also, the amount of disrespect towards the publishers here makes me very sad.

I don't disrespect Pix'N Love but I dislike their attitude and how they handle business. It is my personal opinion that I formed based on experience I had with them. Hope I made it clear. If I disrespected them, I would not try to get book and show support by all means when their site prevented me to order one on my address (I paid on their website in the end so they got my money but book had to be first delivered to my friend's address since their site was glitched up for my location even though they claimed they ship worldwide everywhere and they never responded to my email and Hunch had same issue with that) and if I was disrespectful, the whole scanned book of collectors edition would be posted online and shared everywhere on every site I wanted to. Since I clearly didn't go and do that and I said I won't scan book (even though I could have done and it is only my good will that I won't scan it and because I made promise), I was in no way disrespectful and was just giving criticism to Pix'N Love as a publisher because I think they should handle business a bit better (my opinion only, not claiming it is fact).

[Haruka]

Also, the amount of disrespect towards the publishers here makes me very sad.

Same here. I fixed the title too.

[Eshap]

I don't disrespect Pix'N Love but I dislike their attitude and how they handle business. It is my personal opinion that I formed based on experience I had with them. Hope I made it clear. If I disrespected them, I would not try to get book and show support by all means when their site prevented me to order one on my address (I paid on their website in the end so they got my money but book had to be first delivered to my friend's address since their site was glitched up for my location even though they claimed they ship worldwide everywhere and they never responded to my email and Hunch had same issue with that) and if I was disrespectful, the whole scanned book of collectors edition would be posted online and shared everywhere on every site I wanted to. Since I clearly didn't go and do that and I said I won't scan book (even though I could have done and it is only my good will that I won't scan it and because I made promise), I was in no way disrespectful and was just giving criticism to Pix'N Love as a publisher because I think they should handle business a bit better (my opinion only, not claiming it is fact).

I don't think calling a publishing company "lazy" because they didn't get English translators on board for the book is a legitimate criticism. Translations are a delicate thing and any inaccuracies could give false information to English readers. I'm almost certain the process isn't a short or cheap one to go through, provided they could find *good* translators in the first place. Perhaps your comment might make more sense if Rayman had a significant amount of popularity in English-speaking countries, but there's little to suggest that an English version is in high demand, with the exception of a few members here who bought the book; why waste the time and money on something that few people will buy? I can see why it got a French-only release, considering it is Rayman's country of origin (we've seen lots of France-only Rayman merch).

Just because you didn't go full-on dickmaster and scan the book doesn't mean your comments towards Pix N Love weren't inconsiderate.

[OCG]

Perhaps your comment might make more sense if Rayman had a significant amount of popularity in English-speaking countries, but there's little to suggest that an English version is in high demand, with the exception of a few members here who bought the book; why waste the time and money on something that few people will buy? I can see why it got a French-only release, considering it is Rayman's country of origin (we've seen lots of France-only Rayman merch).

Rayman is actually more popular in other countries than France despite France being his country of origin and thats a fact so it would made more sense if English book came around same time.

[Bradandez]

But what's both funny and sad is that some French gamers were convinced that Rayman was created by Americans.

USA! USA! USA! But seriously, that's just plain disgraceful to Rayman.

[Master]

Aiaiai, really? Considering how Rayman titles take inspiration from European folklore, that's a little disappointing.

[Eshap]

Perhaps your comment might make more sense if Rayman had a significant amount of popularity in English-speaking countries, but there's little to suggest that an English version is in high demand, with the exception of a few members here who bought the book; why waste the time and money on something that few people will buy? I can see why it got a French-only release, considering it is Rayman's country of origin (we've seen lots of France-only Rayman merch).

Rayman is actually more popular in other countries than France despite France being his country of origin and thats a fact so it would made more sense if English book came around same time.

Yeh? Where does it say that this is a fact? I'm genuinely curious.

[OCG]

Game sales pretty much confirm that, Motormike said that some French even think Rayman is American and once during Rabbid discussion, Haruka said that Clara told her that Rayman was mostly unknown to French audience before Rabbids and they referred to Rayman as "That Rabbids guy" or something like that.

[Pirez]

Introduce me to those people and I will happily bash their head with a cochonnet.

[OCG]

LOL, you have no idea how hilarious it looks when you wrote comment like that, having negative ting counter

[Pirez]

As Bill Parcells would say : "Your record says who you are". Congrats Lovy, you made me an outlaw who kills Frenchies with a cochonnet. I'm going up to make that a horror movie...

[Eshap]

Nononono, I mean like...actual evidence instead of you fact-pulling. Got some graphs or something?
Spreadsheet?

[Shrooblord]

Reason why I called Pix lazy is because based on factual evidence how long translation takes for let's say video game which is harder than book because of changing code and stuff, this indeed is too slow

You have no idea what you're talking about and you're bullshitting not just everyone, but also yourself. Sorry, OCG, but it being a game or a book has absolutely no influence on how hard it is to translate. Localisation is quite easy for games if set up right; how I'd handle it myself would be like so:

Code: Select all

prefs = ini.open("Preferences.ini", -r);  //Holding keys and values, with language an array
localLanguage = ini.read(prefs, "lang"); //for example 'English' is indexed as '1', French indexed as '2'
ini.close();
if (localLanguage == null) {localLanguage = 1;}
switch (localLanguage)
{
  case 1: langFile = file.open("en-GB.langfile"); //These langfiles are constructed with indeces preceeding text as tables
  case 2: langFile = file.open("fr.langfile"); //such that you can call a specific line in the game by accessing an array
  case default: langFile = file.open("en-GB.langfile"); //i.e. script[0] = "Long ago in a Galaxy far, far away..." for English and script[0] = "Il y a bien longtemps, dans une galaxie lointaine, très lointaine..."
}

scriptText0 = langFile.readLine(0);
print(scriptText0);

langFile.close();

This is a shoddy mock-up code, but if you try to read it, you'll see it's easy enough to set up localisation just by adding more language files and a definition for said language file in the 'switch' statement.

I would even argue a book is harder to set up, not only because it usually has more words than a game does, but also because it needs to be far more coherent in itself - the game has visuals to rely on to help improve translation and help emotions come across. A book has only language.

Yes I'm hostile. Why? Because I have a problem with people that talk as if they know what they're talking about when really they're just pulling facts out of nowhere. A game is not harder to translate than a book 'because it has code'. It's no easier or harder to translate than a film would be. 'Code' doesn't make a difference in translation, unless the code was set up improperly and you have to go and rewrite the entire game in French or German or whatever each time you want to create a new localisation (which tells you something about the lack of forethought put into the original code itself, not the difficulty of the process by nature).

[Master]

Hmm, not related to the point you're making, just an observation on myself. I got most of the code there, but there's definitely stuff I have no inkling about, such as these .open/.writeline etc. things.

[OCG]

Nononono, I mean like...actual evidence instead of you fact-pulling. Got some graphs or something?
Spreadsheet?

While http://www.vgchartz.com/ does not list sales per country but per region, you can see that older Rayman games did better in US than in Europe for example.
I also remember reading it in past about sales but I sadly cannot find sources (if anyone can it would be appreciated). Motormike also wrote his doubts about book selling good which means there has to be some reason why is he doubting. He could perhaps confirm it fully if Rayman sells better outside of France than in France.

Do you perhaps have some evidence to claim otherwise regarding sales since you said in your post:

I can see why it got a French-only release, considering it is Rayman's country of origin (we've seen lots of France-only Rayman merch)..

that you understand why is book French only release.

[Eshap]

In a sense, I have some evidence: the history that Rayman's merchandise have been predominantly released in France, both local only and internationally. A quick browsing of the Rayman Merchandise thread on RPC's Wiki shows that many items were France-only releases and that very few of them were not released in France at all. That, and for the reasons both myself and Shroob have been harping onto you about how difficult it can be to make a solid translation.

Whether this is down to Rayman's popularity in France or simply the ease of releasing content in his country of origin, that isn't actually all that clear, but neither reason is out of the realm of possibility, since you've (still) given very little evidence that Rayman, overall, is more popular in English-speaking countries than any other and that the book would have enough significant interest to warrant an international release.

Thinking about it, though, reading Shroob's explanation as to why a translation hasn't been released is far better than us two bickering about sales that neither of us can prove concretely.

[Shrooblord]

Hmm, not related to the point you're making, just an observation on myself. I got most of the code there, but there's definitely stuff I have no inkling about, such as these .open/.writeline etc. things.

readLine not writeLine.
It's mostly because it's a simplification for the sake of legibility for the non-programmers hanging around. They're functions I borrowed from multiple languages like the Game Maker Language, Lua and Javascript. The code in itself is more of a concept that an actually working piece of code (because it wasn't written with any particular language in mind), but with not many alterations (i.e. actually implementing the correct I/O system for reading and writing files instead of this placeholder; correctly implementing the 'array' nature of the language files by writing a separate function to decypher what the line read in the script file means to the program and actually displaying the correct text when called; etc.), this would be a functional framework for localised game text.

But the point is that the ease I had coming up with this should show that games being written in game code doesn't alter the difficulty of translating their in-game text compared to translating a book.