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Arabic language inclusion
Sami_SA_1996139
Member Posts: 6 ★
Hello Kabam, please include the Arabic language. This is unreasonable. You do not know the extent of the suffering we are in... especially those who do not master the English language. We cannot read the nodes and links on the heroes. I swear to you that I take screenshots and then translate them. We are very tired of this matter. We cannot talk to the members of the alliance. We cannot arrange the matters of the war. Even when I want to give my opinion, I go to Google Translate, type and translate, then enter the game and copy it so that I can talk to the members. This is unreasonable. Please look into the matter and include the Arabic language. Thank you.
Post edited by SummonerNR on
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I'm sure they'd let you fund the project, but I imagine they're even less likely to invest the money now than they were 3 years ago.
Right-to-Left (RTL) languages versus Left-to-Right (LTR) and object placement problems, it is NOT just a simple matter of text translation.
from https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/299842/what-is-the-reason-for-deleting-the-arabic-language#latest
Hey Everyone
I wanted to give a bit more insight on this topic because I think it warrants a thorough explanation from a more technical angle.
Supporting RTL languages like Arabic means flipping almost the entire UI horizontally. While we have some decent tech to handle this flip; there are often many edge cases where elements get flipped incorrectly and it pretty much just breaks the user interface. This means whenever we create a new screen or modify an existing one we almost inevitably will get a bunch of bugs relating to RTL layout. To fix this we often have to use a bunch of weird hacky workarounds and then make sure these fixes don’t break the game in the LTR format. In addition to this, I am told by our (Localization) team that there exist many intricacies in the Arabic language, that when pushed into our text components can cause them to not render correctly. This then requires them to go in manually and insert hidden extra characters to make it display correctly.
We have done all of the above over the years because we value our Arabic players but there comes a point where it is no longer worth all of this effort in order to support the language. It genuinely makes me sad to think that there will be players that can no longer enjoy the Contest because we no longer support a language that they know and can fully understand. It’s, unfortunately, one of those things where every day we spend supporting RTL is a day we can’t spend fixing and making other things, and thus it no longer makes sense to support it.
The problem is that the way the game is built and functions causes significant issues with a right-to-left language. It's not as simple as just translating it and sticking it into the game. Other games may do it just fine, but they're other games. They're not built the same, the don't act the same, and they may even have larger Arab audiences.
It is a combination of issues, not Kabam's inability or lack of desire to address the issue. They can't just magically change the language and stick it in there. They have to change the entire user interface. Doing that can impact players in every single other language negatively, so it requires a larger amount of manpower, which means it also requires more money. And they have to do it with every single build. As they also said in their posts that you ignored, the Arab player base just isn't large enough to justify the cost of having to build the entire game around right-to-left languages. Probably why it doesn't have Hebrew either.
Get thousands of Arabic speaking players to join the game and maybe the conversation changes, but for the time being it unfortunately is what it is, and what it is is far more complicated than you think. It isn't unreasonable, but rather it is a responsible, albeit unfortunate to some, business decision to not spend a large sum of money with minimal return.
في الموسم الماضي هل أخبرتني ما السبب علما انني قد شاركت في جميع الحروب
That is a wide range of languages, but certainly not all written languages. Arabic is probably the most widespread written language not supported, but it is also by several orders of magnitude the most difficult one to support. In fact, all the rules for writing all of those languages combined are probably shorter than the rules for writing Arabic alone. That's separate from the cost to actually translate the language properly.
It is a common misconception among non-native readers of the language that the biggest issue with Arabic is that it is a right to left language. But that's actually false for two reasons. One: Arabic is not a strict right to left language. It actually uses both directions.
And Two: Arabic has a lot of complex rules for writing it that make it extremely difficult to render. For one thing, it is a purely cursive language. In other words, there's no such thing as mono-spaced block letter Arabic. Properly written Arabic, even on computer screens, requires letters to flow together in words, and actually change shape depending on surrounding text. Letters will combine, merge, or disappear completely in properly written Arabic. And the problem is not that the game has to figure this all out. Rather, the underlying OS will likely figure out how to do all of this. The problem is that the game client has to predict how iOS or Android will render text so that it can account for that in the UI layout. And predicting what text will look like in Arabic is very difficult in the general case. Adding or subtracting a single word from a line of text can in some cases literally change the appearance of the rest of the words, and in turn change the amount of space the text takes up in the UI by disproportionate amounts.
Tom Scott (who I believe is a linguist by education) made a video years ago regarding an iOS crash bug that involved Arabic text. Sending a message with a particular sequence of Arabic could cause some iPhones to completely crash out. This was due to iOS failing to properly account for the rules of Arabic when attempting to display truncated text.
Players see the game according to their own language, not someone else's. Why would adding a language force other players to see it? Ridiculous.
One: Arabic is not a strict right to left language. It actually uses both directions.
- That's a falls claim & you are welcome to show me your evidence.
Two: Arabic has a lot of complex rules for writing it that make it extremely difficult to render.
-It wasn't "extremely difficult to render" back in 2017 when they launched Transformers: Forged to Fight
You don't care about the language? Then why are you here arguing to not be added? The OP didn't ask for your opinion nor the likes of you in the "nice" community. He clearly addressed Kabam, so why are you triggered? Are you Kabam or just wanna express your hate towards Arabs?
I don't think your query is sarcastic, I think it is nitpicking. You picked the one irrelative point to argue about & ignored the core of the issue, which is the lack of Arabic support and the hollow excuses used to justify that.
For that alone, you have won the "I caught you" trophy. Congrats.
You see, the OP is just like me, doesn't speak English well, so I presume that they meant "All these languages" but wrote "All the languages" as a term exaggeration.
I can assure you that both MCOC and TFTF don't support all languages, and I am not aware of any game that does that. Let me know if you find one.
Have a delightful day, my good Sir.
It's not an irrelevant point. OP is stating something as fact, and I wanted to know what his fact was, because I have never come across a game like he's saying.
Arabic is a language used by so many oil rich countries, some with free education provided, there's a significant number of Arabic users who are highly educated and fluent in English
I would assume that Arabic users would contribute a significant amount of revenue to Kabam for them to support Arabic but the reply from them indicates that it is unprofitable to do so, it is unlikely that Arabic users aren't spending
It is more likely that the Arabic users who spend in this game probably did not stop spending as they are highly educated and understand English
Kabam seems to have benefitted from the best of both worlds, the revenue from Arabic region probably did not drop and also saved significant amount of money from not spending to support Arabic in game
If Kabam isn't going to change its policy den it is probably better to learn English while playing a game, you might thank Kabam in future for making you learn English which you can use in other games or work
(*yes, they did support it previously).
Responses such as how (loosely paraphrasing, you can read it all yourself) they used to have to do a lot of extra work all the time, for right-to-left languages, including Arabic, which included object positioning on screen (not just text).
So they did away with those languages.
And this thread was finished for half a month, until revived (in Arabic) to ask about their AW Rewards (but everyone started going back to the original issue of language support, not OP's follow-up, wrong post to revive it, question about not getting AW rewards).
Further questions about the language itself can refer back to the beginning here.
Although, this is a bit hazy, as (at least as I understand it) in Arabic traditionally such numbers were read right to left but also LSDF, which is indistinguishable from reading them left to right. Most sources I've seen say that numbers and formulas are written left to right by convention in modern times. There are specific rules for handling things like percentage signs, inequality signs (i.e. <>) and the units of quantities, but I do not know what all of the specifics are. Just because a game had support for Arabic, doesn't mean it wasn't difficult to handle. Arabic is considered one of, if not the most complex languages for computers to support. This is an entirely uncontroversial statement. MCOC also supported Arabic at one time, but that language was dropped specifically because of the time and expense necessary to do so. So just pointing to a game that supported it demonstrates nothing. How expensive a language like Arabic is to support is dependent on the game and the language requirements. Different software can have an easier or harder time to support it. In the very post you're quoting I mention the problem from a few years back where mishandling Arabic caused iOS to completely crash out. And Apple has several orders of magnitude more resources to support a language than Kabam does.