Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
each image with the translated text. Translation services will not translate
images for you, only text.
Auto-translation services These don't work well enough. Forget Babelfish
or Google Translate unless you want your users to laugh and cry at your app
and generally consider your attempt at translation a cheap effort. It signific-
antly decreases the app's subjective value in the eyes of the user if it was
clearly translated by a computer.
I used to work on game-translation tools and processes. If the preceding list sounds like a
lot to consider, I can tell you it's just the tip of the iceberg. And I'm merely recalling these
issues from memory; I probably neglected to mention a few more things to consider.
Fortunately, you don't have to consider all cases, as they won't all apply to your app. And
as an independent developer, you're more easily forgiven if your app is English-only or
provides great fun for players despite the occasional localization oddity. Yet there's a real
risk for ridicule if you try to translate cheaply or automatically. In that case, it's probably
better not to translate at all.
Also, iOS provides ways to format strings in a localized manner, based on the device's
locale. For example, you can format dates in the current locale by passing an NSDate
through a NSDateFormatter .
Tip You'll find a plethora of helpful information on Apple's Internationaliza-
tion website: https://developer.apple.com/internationaliz-
ation/ .
TrueType vs. Bitmap Fonts
On modern GUI operating systems, TrueType fonts with the .ttf or similar extension are
used almost exclusively. Their main benefit is that they scale to any dimension without
losing quality, because TrueType fonts describe the characters (also called glyphs ) as out-
lines. A glyph's outlines are either straight lines or Bezier curves. With a purely mathem-
atical description of the glyphs in a font, it is possible to render them at various point sizes
with clearly defined, sharp outlines. A glyph can also be expressed with a relatively small
dataset, thus TrueType fonts are typically smaller in file size than a bitmap font.
Bitmap fonts are relatively common in games. They don't scale without losing image
quality, but they render faster because glyphs in a bitmap font are just sprites that need to
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