KrunchyFriedGames wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2019 9:45 am
Sadly, mine doesn't, and since all my characters are at least a little bit mental, they'd probably be happier if I didn't have any non-binary characters!
My reply will be bringing us a bit off-topic from the original question, but I'll throw in my two cents here anyway.
If most or all of your characters are "a little bit mental," it's not necessarily going to be considered problematic to have some of them be non-binary (or another queer identity). Not every real-life queer person is a perfect angel, and fiction can and should reflect this with queer characters who are flawed.
The problem arises when the character's flaw is either directly BECAUSE they are queer, or when the flaw is a harmful stereotype associated with certain identities. For example, given controversies like the whole Transgender Bathroom Debate, if you have a trans character who is a sexual predator, even if the character doesn't target people they meet in the bathroom, people are going to get upset (and for good reason).
Anyway, it's just something to think about for future games, not to say that you need to rewrite your finished game to include non-binary characters. (:
To make sure this post doesn't stray too far from the topic, I'll give an answer to the original question, although it might not be all that helpful. I wrote a very short game called
The Dark two years ago, which has been released in English. I haven't released any translations because I simply haven't had the time or the motivation to sit down and do it, but I do have the scripts for a Spanish translation and a French translation saved.
I actually did the Spanish translation myself, which is something that most people recommend against doing (Spanish is my second language and I'm far from fluent). However, the project in question is less than 1000 words and released for free, so I figured that the worst-case scenario was that someone would point out my mistake and I could fix it. I still covered my bases anyway by having my Spanish teacher at the time look over my translation and add corrections; she isn't a native speaker either, but she has a degree to teach Spanish and I learned enough from her in 3 years to be comfortable speaking when I studied abroad in Spain so those things must count for something. (: The moral of the story here is that knowing someone IRL can help a lot, since you can check back with them for updates without being ghosted, which can unfortunately sometimes happen when hiring freelancers online.
I didn't have any specific plans to translate the game to French, but I stumbled across a post here on LemmaSoft by the user
Fulcrum offering translation services that could be free or paid depending on the project. Since my project was so short I figured it was worth asking if I could trouble him for a free translation. I sent the PM and logged off, was unable to log on the next day due to my job, and by the time I logged on the day after I came back to several updates on the process and a completed translation. I had warned him beforehand that there might be difficulties in translating from English into French (a gendered language) since my characters were written to be ambiguously gendered (hey, look, all the stuff I said earlier is relevant, a little bit). In the updates he sent he explained to me the potential and actual difficulties and how he fixed them, including suggesting a different name for one of the characters due to the cultural perception of the name in question. So, I had a great experience working with him, but I didn't do anything special to find him - I just took advantage of a post here on the forums. He could have turned out to be horrible to work with for all I knew (and, I still haven't gotten around to publishing the translation, so there's always the possibility that he did a poor job on it, although in this case in particular I'm inclined to trust his translation skills).
Ultimately, all of my translation attempts have been mostly due to getting lucky enough to find the right person at the right time, especially considering that I received all of my translation services for free, but definitely finding someone who communicates with you and gives you updates throughout the process, as my two translators did, is a big plus. And if you end up paying someone, which you'll probably have to do for a larger game, I would look for people who have completed translations and/or positive recommendations under their belts.
After typing this reply I kind of feel like taking out those translations and trying to figure out the coding to implement them into the game. If/when I get around to it, I'll let you know how the process goes. (:
