please read *** READ BEFORE POSTING *** - Posting in the Translation Forum

[Woodg SI]

We would like to hear of any issues you have with any of the tens of thousands of text strings (2.5 million words and over 150,000 strings (phrases)) within FM 2021 in your own language, so we can endeavo(u)r to fix as many of them as possible.

Topics for each individual language we officially release:

Chinese (Simplified)

Chinese (Traditional)

Danish

Dutch

English-UK

English-US

French

German

Greek

Italian

Korean

Norwegian

Polish

Portuguese

Russian

Spanish

Swedish

Turkish

Before you post anything in this forum, we would ask you to read through this post so you can;

• get a basic understanding of how the translation system works
• know what information to give when posting about issues
• find out how to get involved in the translation process of our future games, if you are interested.

Translation System

The main thing to remember is that what you see on the screen is rarely a direct translation as most sentences (strings as we call them) contain variables within them. So if you are thinking “How could the translator make such a basic error?” it may not be as simple an error as it appears to be.

If we look at the simple string:

The English Premier Division match between Arsenal and Man Utd originally scheduled for 21st October has been moved to 26th October due to international call ups.

 

This is how it appears in our code

The <%fixture_name#1-long> match between <%team#1-short-notype> and <%team#2-short-notype> originally scheduled for <%date#2-long> has been moved to <%date#1-long> due to international call-ups.

 

And:

Veteran defender Paolo Maldini has announced that he is unhappy because he wants a more influential role in the Milan first team.

 

This is how it appears in our code

{upper}<%position#1-lowercase> <%person#1> has announced that he is unhappy because he wants a more influential role in the <%club#1-short> first team.

 

As you can see there are different variable parts with in it to cater for any club in any competition on any date or any player position within a team as it would be impossible to have a different string for each and every possibility

As most other languages have different genders and cases this can make translations a lot more complicated.

Variables such as competition names, club names, stadium names etc can have different genders which will affect their article (e.g. “the”, “a”), their associated verb (e.g. “has”, “is”) and any associated adjective (e.g. “veteran”, “powerful”).

Some languages have case inflections which means the articles, verbs and sometimes the nouns themselves can change depending on their gender and where they are placed in the string (the subject, object etc).

Most variable parts are pulled from our research database which means that in other languages each club, competition etc has to be assigned a number to denote its gender.

In this way we are able to define which article, verb or adjective is used in conjunction with the variable and most of the time we are able to get this all correct in the game.

So translation errors can be a simple wrong translation or can be a problem with the above system or that a variable has been assigned the incorrect gender or no gender at all and a default used. Or sometimes a translation will be grammatically correct but may not be the most common way of saying something. This could be down to the translator trying to make the translation fit into the limitations of our current system.

Logging Bugs and Errors

If you want to report an error, please provide a screenshot wherever possible. Also make sure you provide the whole sentence exactly as it is (including any special characters).

Where possible provide a correction and, again, put the whole corrected sentence and provide an explanation of why it is wrong.

Female Non-Player Feature

Anyone female playing the game or any non-playing female within the game should now be referred to correctly.

This has added a new level to the translation system as each string that refers to the game player or a non-playing person must have a female equivalent string so the translation can be correctly created.

As with any other part of the translation we would like to hear of any errors that are spotted so we can get them fixed.

Getting involved – Existing and New Languages

If you are interested in getting involved in the translation process (including translation, proof reading and testing) please let us know at (remove spaces and replace bracketed words with the correct symbols):

si-translation |at| sigames [dot] com

Ideally a translator should have the following qualities:

• An aptitude for translation (preferably with relevant experience or qualifications)
• Mother tongue speaker for target language and in particular football terms and colloquialisms
• Very good knowledge of English and in particular football terms and colloquialisms
• Lots of experience in playing FM games

So please let us know in your email how you fit the above qualities.