Worth having multiple languages?

[Tribal]

When creating a bbgame. Is it worth having it available in multiple languages? What do you need to do in order to make non-preconfigured texts available in multiple languages? For example the chat box? Players forum topics?

Do you just display forum posts in the users language? And chatbox entries in the users language? Doing that just by having an extra column in the database named language?

[Zeggy]

Umm.. you'd need some translation software to translate chat/forum messages, and even that won't work well at all...

I think you could:
Either leave the chat/forum messages in the language which they are typed (or add a rule that only english is allowed), and simply have the game text itself available in different languages.

Or, set up completely different sites for the game in different languages. You could use specific country code domain extensions for example, so all french players would play on the french site and chat in french, while all english players would do so on the english site. I guess this is just the world wide web equivalent of game servers/zones that are separated by region/language.

[Chris]

Depends what you mean by that.

internationalisation (having the game in multiple languages so the user can choose one) - not worth it, one language group will dominate the game communication making the game unplayable for other players (try playing an English/Spanish language game on a game dominated by Spanish players and you will see what I mean).

localisation (having multiple separate games with different languages, usually via subdomain) - might be worth it, assuming you have access to the target language players. Be aware of "multibyte languages" (mostly Asia I think), you will have to rewrite some basic string manipulation functions and change database structure in worst case scenario.

I do not believe internationalisation would work in BBG, I have only seen one successful example, it is Reversi on Windows (where you have predefined full sentences you send to other players). On the other hand there are plenty successfully localised games.

[Helderic]

Facebook has a feature (if your game is coded using FBML?) were users of your game/application can translate it for you.

[Tribal]

Ok. However to be honest i do not think that there will be many players who will be willing to translate the whole game including "on the fly" chatbox translation.