Posted on 3 February 2023 by BaerbelW

Our Cranky Uncle Game can already be played in eight languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. About 15 more languages are in the works at various stages of completion or have been offered to be done. To kick off the new year, we checked with how our teams are doing and whether some help for their volunteer efforts is needed. The result is this "Call for help", listing  languages where our teams indicated specific areas they could use help with.

The translation tasks

Before listing the languages and what help is needed, here's some information about what translating the game entails with regards to type of work and effort needed. Not to mince words, translating the game is neither a quick nor a simple task, but I found it both creative and rewarding, and that also holds true for the teams who created the already published languages.

From already launched languages we know that it's quite a large task and requires a team of ideally three to four people in order to help with translating, brainstorming and proofreading. There are about 2000 items to translate from single words to larger paragraphs as well as many questions and answers, some of which require creative solutions as explained in this blog post. Cooperative translation work happens in a Google Workspace and utilizes a large Google sheet as well as several Google docs. Depending on time available it has taken between three and four months to finish the translation task for a language, based on experience thus far.

Once the translation is complete in the Google workspace it needs to be manually copied from there into the content managment system (CMS) feeding into the game. This is - as you can imagine - the least fun task of the whole endeavour but unfortunately there's just no feasible way to somehow safely automate it. Again depending on available time and people involved, this copy & paste task will take between three and four weeks (unless you can keep doing it for longer than about 2 hours in one sitting!).

In addition to the game itself, some supporting material needs to be translated, like the privacy and informed consent information or the mock-ups you see in the app stores for the game. Several educational materials can but don't have to be translated.

Language specific help needed

Additional translators to establish a team of three to four people:

• Bulgarian
• Danish
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Tamil
• Romanian
• Russian
• Ukranian

Help with proofreading (almost) complete languages:

• Czech

Help with copy and paste into the CMS:

• Polish

Are you up for this challenge? If yes, then please fill out this Google form to let us know which language you'd like to support for which task. I'll then be in touch and put you in contact with others working on the translation.

Cranky Thanks!