Why Turkish translation is not added in games?

[Crast19]

Hi. I am Salih. sorry first. because my english is very little. I am 17 years old. and I am from Turkey. I wonder " Why Turkish translation is not added in games?" because Turkish is spoken by +100 million people in World. Companies do not have to add Turkish but Horizon Zero Dawn™ game contains 20 languages .Contains even Danish. 5.5 million people speak Danish. I feel sorry for this situation. Turkish gamers have this problem in most games

have a nice day

 

[Pifanjr]

The video game market in Turkey seems to be fairly small. Like only about 2-3 times the size of Denmark. It's possible translating a game to Turkish is significantly more expensive than translating it into Danish, making it unprofitable to do so.

 

[Crast19]

I disagree with you. A report on the Turkish PC/Console game ecosystem:
most popular gamer group in Turkey : Flamer Gaming (167k)
most popular game channel in Turkey : Multiplayer TV (500k)
Playstation Fans Facebook Group (24k)
Xbox Fans Facebook Group (10k)

Turkey population : 83 million
Turkish citizens in World: 6.5 million
Turkish in Germany : 5 million (No dual citizenship in Germany)
Azerbaijan population : 10 million (90% similar language)

Turkish players: 31 million but most mobile gamers(only Turkey istatistics)
The biggest problem : foreign language learning infrastructure in Turkey. Infrastructure is very bad. People learn in their own way
also Turkish games studio available
Mount&Blade
Peak Games

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I feel your frustration and I would feel the same in your position.

I think the answer is money as @Pifanjr said. If there were enough of a predicted effect on sales to justify the cost then companies would localize to Turkish. Turkey is a significant economy in the world.

I imagine that most gamers in Turkey are just used to buying games and managing in English or whatever other language they are able to understand well enough and will continue to do so. I have a Turkish friend and he has said to me before that the language and grammar is quite complicated to translate to. Perhaps that makes it hard for auto translation tools to be used?

To be fair that wouldn't be enough to stop them if there were enough people in Turkey who would not buy the games anyway without localization.

 

[Zloth]

Auto-translation tools aren't up to converting ANY language yet.

Sometimes there's more to it than just changing the words around, too. You might have a sign or billboard in the game where English fits nicely but it doesn't fit in German, while in Turkish the phrase is so short that it makes the sign look weirdly large.

In Larian's Divinity games, there's a mage named Bellegar that always speaks in rhyme. "Wherever thou runneth, be it near or afar, I will find thee still, I Bellegar!" To localize the character, you wouldn't just have to translate, you would have to try and figure out a translation that still rhymes. (What really confuses me, though, is that Larian is in Belgium. Belgium has three official languages, none of which are English!)

So yeah, it's all about the money. Studios have to guess how much the localization is going to cost them and weigh it against how much money they expect to make back by doing the translation. If it looks favorable and if they can find somebody reliable that can do it, they'll do it. Unfortunately, that can lead to feedback problems. Because games aren't often translated into Turkish, Turks are less likely to make a hobby of playing games, which means the expected sales get lower, which means even fewer games translated into Turkish.

 

[MaddMann]

I have not done much research, but could it also possibly be partly due to local legislation? For example (and please do not think I am comparing Turkey with China) China has a lot of laws pertaining to what can and cannot be show in media (video games included) so there are a very large amount of game not legally available in China and therefore there is no Chinese translations for these games despite the amount of possible players is huge.
Otherwise, I will have to agree with what others are saying and that it comes down to money. How profitable is it for them to hire somebody to re-write the script in a way that makes sense when translated to Turkish.
Is it a requirement in schools there to learn a second language? (not that you should have to)

 

[Rolfil]

I agree. At least for the more popular games it would make sense to translate to more languages.

However translation is not a simple thing. Modern Turkish based on the Latin alphabet did not even exist pre 1932 and at present only 80% of spoken Turkish has a modern written equivalent.
Also Turkish contains 24 latin characters and 5 additional characters - however this should not cause a problem thesedays as any game should be using Unicode which has these extra characters present. It just causes more cost.