Question about German translations

I am making games in English but understand that there is a large market for German audiences.

I am probably going to be releasing my first couple of games for free as I am learning to create both art and adventure games.

I know that there are a large number of Germans in the Visionaire community and was wanting to know the following:

#1 Do you play English games and do most Germans know English?

#2 Would it be disrespectful to do translations in something like google translate and state German language support?

#3 Does anyone know what it would cost to pay translators to do a proper German translation? (cost per words or something as this is very subjective based on game length)

Hopefully this post will be useful to other English game developers wanting to make their game accessible to a German audience.

Thanks for any input you can provide,

Anthony

I usually play the games in English if the game was created in English. Or when there is English voice over and German texts I switch to English subtitels, because I find it very distracting when you read something else than you are hearing.

Most Germans understand English well enough. But for some it feels more like "work" playing in a different language, which contradicts the "having fun" part of playing a game. So they don't play if there is no translation. (I guess it's the same in France, Italy, Spain...)

Google translation would be better than none, I guess, but only for a free game. But make sure you tell the player in advance that it is a google translation. These translations are sometimes hard to understand. For a commercial game I would not risk it. That is a shitstorm waiting to happen.

No idea about the costs. A quick search came up with about 0,15- 0,20 € per word or 0,80 - 2,50 € per line. There is quite a range here.

Instead of Google Translate I'd highly recommend using DeepL as the translation quality is superior:

the translations with deepl should be good enough in most cases.

I would also recommend using deepl. It's free (the online web browser version is at least, not sure about the downloadable app). It's a lot more accurate than google translate, but even so it's only really any good for translating formal texts - which is the same for all other translators.

If it's going to be a free game, you might get lucky & be able to find some people willing to translate to x language for free. You never know, unless you ask.