Apogee Communications Blog

Off to San Francisco!

Edwin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:52:33 +0000

I’m off to San Francisco and GDC in the morning!

If you’ve come here trying to figure out how to contact me, my cellphone number is 951-240-1762. Feel free to SMS (preferred) or call.

Looking forward to a big time in the city. Many posts will follow the Conference if it’s anything like last year.

Chinese Translations are First

Edwin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:53:53 +0000

I’ve been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I’d actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program. The numbers below are the top 12 (of 45 languages) from the last two years of work Apogee has done.

There are a few surprises here. Chinese is a full 26% of our workload, by wordcount. One reason for that, as well as Russian’s place in the statistics, is that a couple of clients decided to translate their backlists into these languages. Another reason is that, for several of our clients, we are one of many translation houses working for them. Either our Chinese work was faster, better or they didn’t offer the language at all, as we were receiving quite a few more requests from them for Chinese than any other language.

It may well be that other houses are seeing more work from the standard French, Italian, German and Spanish combination, but here we’re working quite a bit on the expansion languages.

Simplified Chinese	15.88%
Traditional Chinese	10.17%
Spanish	9.96%
Russian	9.38%
Italian	9.31%
German	8.40%
Japanese	8.28%
French	7.70%
Norwegian	3.60%
Latin American Spanish	2.99%
Thai	2.41%
Brazilian Portuguese	2.10%

Civilization Five

Edwin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:11:22 +0000

All is right with the world. Sid Meier is putting out a new update of the classic game. We’ve handled the localization of one of the Civilization variants in the past. With luck, we’ll get to touch on something of this one as well.

There was a poll last year that ranked games not by how many people bought a copy, but rather by how much time was actually spent playing them. World of Warcraft was first; Civilization was second.

Link to the Civ V website.

Apogee at GDC and E3

Edwin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:55:59 +0000

Apogee Communications will once again be attending both E3 and GDC this year. Let us know if you will be there too!

Looking forward to seeing all of our favorite people again.

iPad Translations

Edwin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:12:56 +0000

The Apple iPad is here. Twice the price of Amazon’s Kindle, but with so much more it can do that it seems cheap in comparison. And with software distribution through the App Store …

This is a game changer, folks.

Videogame Statistics

Edwin — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:56:47 +0000

A beautifully rendered, tall poster of videogame statistics. It shows clearly where the Wii focus is, and why it has been such a success.

Go below the fold to see the whole thing.

Source: Online Education

Avatar Reviews from China

Edwin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:33:49 +0000

The blockbuster of the Holiday Season was Avatar. It opened two weeks later in China, and has accumulated a number of reviews. The main link is here, but I’ll extract a few key observations.

—The Na’vi’s system of hereditary rule proves that democracy is not universally applicable.
—Dr. Grace Augustine shows the weaknesses of intellectuals, which are not to be trusted.
—When (will) Westerners stop seeing foreign cultures as female and themselves as male?

Happy New Year!

Edwin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:28:43 +0000

From all of us, to all of you: Happy New Year!

See you on the other side.

Photo of our CEO – 22 years ago

Edwin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:42:36 +0000

October 1987. Edwin Steussy, 24, in India.

This is a photo recently rescued of me in India. I lived outside of the United States for about ten years, and this was the biggest adventure in many ways. This photo has been lost for over 20 years and just came back to me. The story is here.

China’s Empty City

Edwin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:28:01 +0000

Ordos, the Empty City

So, China has made $600 billion in infrastructure investment? Where has it gone? Is this one of the answers? Click here for the video – the report starts at 1:15 minutes in.