Random weapon name language translation

[BaronWilhelm]

I'm currently developing a Roguelike game and am using generated weapon names.  My current method takes a wildcard string "%s%s %s" and uses a word dictionary to generate a name like "Megapower Gun" or "Superduper Sword", etc... 

I really want to translate/localize my game text to east Asian countries (China/Japan/Korea) but am not sure if the string-swapping technique I'm using will produce results which make enough sense.  Does anyone have experience with these languages or have suggestions on how to generate reasonable names?

[AgingMinotaur]

You shouldn't spend too much energy thinking about translating your game into a language you don't even know yet. Also note that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are completely different languages. Linguistically speaking, Dutch and Hindi are more similar than are Chinese and Japanese. Having said that: From my very limited knowledge, a system structured like the one you propose should be translatable into Japanese. So just go for it. You can worry about rain once you have the sky in place.

As always,
Minotauros

[BaronWilhelm]

I hear what you're saying.  It's going to be an iOS game so I figured it'd be easier to structure it for localization from the start of the project rather than tacking it on at the end.  Those are the major languages I'd like to tackle and if any of them was going to result in gibberish I was just going to cut translation all together, it'd certainly be less work.  From what I've found it seems like it's going to be ok as long as they are not sentences or longer phrases.  That requires more context and could sound strange.  I'll probably write a script to translate my word dictionary through Google translate and use an affordable service like mygengo.com for the user interface text.  We'l have to see how it goes.