MC2 Translation Handbook

If you are a professionnal translator, thanks for joining us in order to give advice.

Translating documents and games is often a full job that requires training and cannot be improvised. We are aware that the majority of community members who wish to participate in the translation are not professional translators. The only two things that you will need for translating My Colony 2 is to be a native speaker of any language other than English and to be able to understand English fluently (this is you to judge, but to give an idea, European B2 level or TOEIC 400 (listening& reading)/TOEFL 20 (in each of 4 categories)).

The process to get the translation implemented into the game is in two parts : the actual translation, and the proofreading. At least two people are required to complete translations in a language. Usually a second sight is very helpful and the proofreading has to be done by someone else than the translation.

The full process is simple :

• join the discord server
• get granted your language role by an admin
• access the tool on Coloniae or download the mobile app and start translating (access forbidden if not registered by an admin)
• once all sentences are translated, get the proofreading done
• once the proofreading is done, translations will be automatically added to the game each time Basts compiles and releases a new game version.

We do this together and remain in contact with all other translators during these steps anyway. Additional checks might be operated by admins in order to ensure that the translations are legit and do not jeopardize the integrity of the game.

As most people are not professional translators, we will give a few guidelines and advice.

The most important thing to remember is that some words or sentences contructions in english are very hard to find an alternative to, so you can heavily restructure the sentence as long as the meaning stays the same. The priority is that it has to be fluent and natural in your language!

Make sure to account for the context, especially for short strings such as "Cancel", "Move", "Build"... These words may have more than one translation given the context, so make sure to pick the correct one. If a string requires a context but none is provided by the tool, we can add one using the !context command in discord (see the #bot channel).

There might be names which are part of the lore of the game. You want to translate the name if it has a meaning in English, for example Sugarland has a meaning, so does United Earth and League of Independent States (examples from MC1). Do not translate names which have no meaning, such as Zolarg. Some names are on the edge so if you are not sure do ask! Also, keep a note of how you translated the names for future reference and consistency. For non-latin alphabet languages, you translate normally the translatable ones (like United Earth) and you transliterate non-translatable ones (like Zolarg). Again, very important to keep track of the transliterations as there might be multiple ones for a single name.

A few technical details:

• Don't change words that begin with a # such as #motherland. It's a special word that will be processed to output the actual name of the mother colony (example from MC1)