Arabic language inclusion

Sami_SA_1996139

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.

Comments

Sami_SA_1996139

Please Kabam, please include the Arabic language option.

Darthbane3141

This would probably be really difficult for Kabam because Arabic has a whole different alphabet and way of reading it. They might already have the game in languages with different alphabets, I'm not sure though.

Furrymoosen

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.

Asher1_1

Learning english might be more easier than right to left text inclusion. Which is way too complex with different node & champs

willrun4adonut

I'd suggest finding an Arabic alliance that uses Line or Discord. But I was also in a German alliance for two years, and they knew I didn't speak German. If something was super important, they would tag me. Otherwise, I'd just drop in a saying/sentence everyday in German after translating the five previous lines to show an effort. I'd say most lower tier alliances are undertaking like that.

SummonerNR

Also from Kabam in 2022
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.

Graves_3

So the fixing and making teams also do language translations? I thought there are separate teams for everything. Perhaps now they do. lol.

Sami_SA_1996139

هذا غريب جدا شركه عالميه مثل كابام لا تقدر علئ حل مشكله لغه هذا غير منطقي نحن في زمن متطور لا يعقل انكم لم تتوصلو الئ حل بسيط رغم ان العبه كانت تدعم الغه العربيه واغلب الألعاب الاجنبيه مدرج فيها جميع الغات ملاحظه بسيطه وانا اعتذر عن كلامي هل فريق كابام يفهم جميع الغات ما عدا الغه العربية هذا لا يعقل سامحوني كابام ولكني انتضر منكم الأفضل

Furrymoosen

So you're just going to ignore everything they actually said to turn this into something it isn't? Nothing about what they said even remotely implied they didn't understand how to do the work.
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.

willrun4adonut

I would like a list of most global games have support for all languages. I would wager that most mobile games do not, and the ones that do are much larger in revenue/size than MCOC. (However, this is based on no evidence so I'd be glad to be shown the correct data).

Sami_SA_1996139

مرحبا كابام لدي استفسار من فضلك لم اتلقئ بعد مكافأت الحرب
في الموسم الماضي هل أخبرتني ما السبب علما انني قد شاركت في جميع الحروب

Mikes_mom

How about a former Kabam's game?

Mikes_mom

Do you really want to know why they won't add Arabic to the game? Just count the "Disagrees" & "Dislikes" you have harvested thus far. Imagine how those players will get triggered when they see Arabic letters on the game interface.

DNA3000

According to the language selector for the game, the game currently supports English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Dutch, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesian.

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.

https://youtu.be/hJLMSllzoLA

ViperOfChampion

AWWWWW YEAH THE GOAT TF FTF

Furrymoosen

That is an incredibly incorrect and ignorant take.
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.

Mikes_mom

@DNA3000
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

Mikes_mom

Do you have a better explanation for the 23 "Disagrees" from the "nice" community on the 1st post? The OP asked a legit question. It doesn't warrant all this hate.

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?

willrun4adonut

I see that this game supports Arabic, but I asked for a list of all languages being supported since that's what OP said. I'm not familiar with this game, does it support all languages?

Mikes_mom

I used it as an example because it was launched by KABAM back in 2017, and it was used as a test drive for MCOC.

willrun4adonut

I guess I'm still confused. Sorry. You used it as an example that a game could support Arabic and thus support all languages? (This may come across as sarcastic, but it's not).

Mikes_mom

Oh, now I see, my dearest apologies, I regret to inform you of my inaptitude to understand nor produce a completely perfect sentence in the language of English.

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.

willrun4adonut

I don't think that at all. OP said that Kabam is ignoring just Arabic, and that all global/foreign games have all languages. I asked for an example of that.

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.

JESUSCHRIST

This is a interesting subject

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

SummonerNR

Poster's initial question about supporting the language was answered fairly early in this thread, with copied responses by Kabam, as well as link to earlier threads about this, from back in 2022 when Kabam got rid of right-to-left Arabic from the game.

(*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.

DNA3000

One of the exceptions is numbers which are sometimes read left to right.

Ref: https://industryarabic.com/numbers-in-arabic/#:~:text=Though Arabic words are written,107, 68, and 236.

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.

DNA3000

Marvel Contest of Champions launched on December 10, 2014, years before TFF. I do not believe either game was used as a test bed for the other.