How Game Fans use Google Translate to Break Language Barriers and Create Joy for One Another
Hero’s Adventure: Road to Passion was not an RPG that was on my radar at all, though given it’s place as an open ended wuxia tactics RPG that holds a number of similarities to Wandering Sword, it should have been. Dropping in early access this past March, the game initially was only available in Chinese. As of hitting 1.0 in November, the game is fully playable to English, thanks in large part to some hardcore fans thirsty to break the wuxia drought over in the west.
Speaking with the creators at Half Amateur Studios, the road to Hero’s Adventure’s English translation was mostly made possible thanks to a strong collaboration between developer and community, with a powerful love of wuxia RPGs bridging the language barrier to bring joy to as wide an audience as they could find.
Hero’s Adventure being a fairly open RPG world with a whole host of storylines and permutations, translation was never going to be an easy task. "We were already dealing with over 300,000 words during Early Access, and then for the 1.0 version, [additional content] pushed our word count past 700,000.” Not to be deterred, translating the game from Chinese was always on the cards. "We had always planned to have the game translated into English, it just really took a lot for this to be done, especially for an indie team of our size.”
Even before early access, fans were clamouring for an English release. Not content to wait for an official update, some simply began to put in the work themselves. "Many enthusiastic players volunteered to translate. Although this meant incorporating a significant amount of machine translation, it at least made the game accessible for wuxia fans around the world."
Whenever I’d read the term “machine translation”, I’d always assumed that meant “extract script, pump it through google translate, re-upload script.” Turns out, it’s a bit different to that, and in a kind of cool way.
On the 18th of May, one fan uploaded a video to YouTube explaining how to implement a live machine translation into their game. With a voiceover tiktok users will immediately recognise, the video describes how with a simple addition to your game files, the game will automatically translate text for you from Chinese to English on the fly as you play. Not only will that translate in real time with a slight buffer, it will save that translation to your file, so once you have hovered over every bit of text, you no longer need to be running the translation file anymore.
While machine translation is far from perfect, it’s enough to understand how to navigate the game and to get the gist of story beats. Thanks to this work, a full machine translation was officially implemented into the game in August. Still, work continued on updating the translation, with the community continuing to provide manual tweaks to the machine translation through feedback on steam and discord.
Leading up to the 1.0 release, the community's work was further built upon by professional services. “We've been working with a localization service familiar with wuxia literature to proofread and polish the community translations. We hope for this effort to deliver a much more coherent experience of the game in English."
This is, however, only one stop on a continuing journey. “We acknowledge the intricate cultural nuances that come with wuxia will present certain challenges. We remain open and grateful for feedback and suggestions from our community, as these are invaluable in our ongoing efforts to improve.”
This drive from the community to overcome language barriers is reminiscent of a time since past, when Japanese games were the ones being imported and translated in the west. It’s a reminder that when culture is shared and approached with positivity and love, we all benefit.
About 2 minutes into the machine translation youtube video, a line in the the auto-translated voice hit different.
“English is not my primary language, but I hope Google Translate will help us understand each other better.”
The comment is immediately followed by a laugh before quickly moving on to demonstrations of gameplay - as if the speaker needed to cover up a moment of genuine sincerity with humour and distraction - but the line sticks with me.
Maybe it’s the mounting geo-political instability and hostility; maybe it’s a wistfulness for a time when game guides were written in ascii instead of chock full of ads; maybe I’m just getting more emotional in my old age. But if people who have a genuine love for a thing happily put in the work to help others also experience that thing, maybe there’s hope for us yet.