So, yesterday I was talking about creating a new website that praises Blizzard, something that could easily become an "Authorized Fansite". A reader mentioned a Brazil fansite that already did something like this and the administrator became a CM.
Everything on the site was taken directly from the Blizzard site and simply translated. Other than that, the only other bells and whistles were links to external sites and a basic forum. It ended up being a very popular site in Brazil.
Much like D3Sanc, there's a good lesson to be learned from that site. You can have a popular site (that Blizzard approves) simply by re-posting and translating. If you can translate well enough, and there aren't any other large fansites specifically for that language, you could make one yourself and just re-post from Blizzard and other Authorized Fansites. You don't even need to live in the region, you only need the translation skills.
The primary translations that Blizzard is looking for are Spanish (español and castellano), Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, and French. Each of these already have a large fansite, but some regions don't really have any competition. The other thing is to keep your eyes on are upcoming translations (like what they did with Brazil recently).. it's something you would want to jump on quickly.
The thing is, too, is that this was just a WoW specific fansite. It got me thinking.. I wonder how successful a simplified universal language site that covers all Blizzard games would do.
It's something that wouldn't require external translation apps (like Babel or Google Translate) since the average user isn't even aware of them. Instead, you would convert all of Blizzard's posts into a more simplified version first, and then translate it.
- Take all of Blizzard's posts, cut out the filler, dumb it down, and just deliver the message in a very simplified manner.
- Convert it into a style that's extremely friendly with translator apps.
- Once you have the simplified version, use your own tools to translate it into as many different languages as possible, and post that on the front page.
- Re-post all of Blizzard's official announcements, their blue forum posts, and Twitter feeds (or more specifically, just the important ones.) Do this for all 3 franchises.
- When the text is simplified, you know it's something that can be easily translated even if you don't have the skill to properly translate it yourself.
Given that we have some many readers here from multiple backgrounds, is this at all possible? Or would dumbing down something be taken as an insult, or not be of any interest?
Take the Battle.tag announcement as an example.
It's a pretty hefty post, but what if you were to dumb it down into something like this:
Blizzard announces new BattleTag service. It is a nickname what will identify you in all Battle.net games and the forums. It is similar to Real ID. It provides a new way to manage your profile, chat with friends, and form groups. You can reserve a BattleTag name now.And then you convert THAT into multiple translations. There would also be linking of course, but I could see a translation problem with special words (like BattleTag) or names (like if you were describing D3 skill names.)
It will be put into the next Diablo 3 beta patch. In the future it will be put into other Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Starcraft.
More details will be released in several weeks.
Do you think a site could get away with something like this? It's almost like a BlizzardKids.com website, but available in all languages. Changing everything Blizzard says into an easily readable and straight-to-the-point format? And because of this, it makes it much easier to translate into other languages with little difficulty.
To test this out, take the example I created above, and use Google translate to convert it into a non-English translation and see how it looks.