Reply To: ONUS! Rome Vs Carthago: English Version of the game

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

And by the way, if you think that telling a publisher to pay a native speaker to revise a translation is a bit of obvious advice, let me assure you, it isn’t. Especially in this day and age of Google Translate where pretty much everyone thinks they can muddle their way through. I hope that in the budget for ONUS’ kickstarter there’s a line item for professional translation revision, but if Zé and the crew actually did that, in my experience, they’d be in the minority of publishers. Hardly anyone pays for revision these days, or even does it. At best, they pass the job off to a friend because they have no idea as to the work it entails and they think that it can be done in a couple of hours during his spare time.

That might be acceptable for most projects these days, but it isn’t acceptable for complex, rules-driven systems like games, for reasons which should be obvious.

By the looks of things, ONUS is a rich and fairly complex system. It will sink or swim based on the legibility and clarity of its rules translation. So please, guys, don’t skimp in this department.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!