Congratulations! You’ve created a great video game! Your heart, soul, sweat and possibly a few secret tears have gone into it. It's a thing of beauty. But now you're about to hand off your masterpiece to a games localization company. That means that more than a little of your money and a lot of your hard work is going to be given over to a different team that now has the responsibility of carrying your vision to other markets around the world. Seems... perilous.
You know more than anyone that the translators need to capture the messaging, dialectics, cultures, references, slang, and all other tones and nuances you put into the game for it to truly be your intended creation. Simply put, this means that your game requires an expertly meticulous localization process applied to it. But what exactly does that involve?
Of course, to achieve quality outcomes in game localization, or anything else for that matter, you should first determine your benchmarks for quality. What does quality look and sound like in a game treated with high-end localization? In order to create a baseline for quality game localization, first critique some game localization examples that you yourself consider good and bad, whether you were personally involved in the creation of those particular games or not.
Your translation service provider should ensure impeccable interpretation of not only the words of your game's text and dialogue, but also their intended usage. The translated text needs to be relatable to the gamer's experience, and more often than not, that experience is shaped by an individual's culture. Essentially, the translated words and phrasing in text and dialogues must sound natural relative to the language it is written in.
Whether you're new to games localization or have experience working with LSPs, you can improve the process by incorporating these tips for maximizing accuracy and the overall quality of your finished game localization project:
Each of these quality factors depends largely on relationship building. In any work environment, building a team mindset is conducive to overall output and quality. If you and your LSP make it your priority to foster your professional relationship by committing to transparency and mutual respect in all communications, then achieving your shared goals for productivity and quality is much easier.
Translation experts can perform much better when they clearly understand your exact concepts and ideal outcomes. So, for the best possible chance to achieve your desired end result — which is to communicate ideally with gamers in international markets — prioritize ideal communication with the people involved in your project.
The following is a checklist for determining whether or not your game is ready for localization:
1. Choose the languages for translation
Even if your game is developed by one company and published by another, and a promotion group may be making the final decisions, marketing analytics and localizers should advise on which languages the game should be translated into and should also determine the availability of quality translation teams for those.
Problems with truncations, un-cooperative text resizing functions, violations of character limits, partially un-localized text, grammar problems and other issues have all been reported across the gaming community in the past — all apparently due to unclear expectations among parties during development.
2. Document and prepare processes
At some point during development, you'll find out which languages the game will be translated into, even though there is not yet any text to start translating. This is the right time to start getting some important preparatory work underway:
3. Collaborate with game developers and localizers
A professional localization team will do thorough research and advise game developers on any potential linguistic issues that may impact the accuracy or overall quality of the project outcome. Some types of issues can be avoided by checking off some essentials, such as:
Rely on lessons learned from your past experience. Have a thorough localization project quality management checklist, and make sure that absolutely nothing on it is overlooked. Also, refer to the IGDA's publication: Best Practices for Game Localization, and incorporate its directives into your protocols.
4. Consider partial automation for game text translations
Predefined and tuned processes are a benefit. But new continuous localization technology offers a seamless process that allows localizers to automate certain steps in text translations, without necessarily compromising quality, to an extent that would negate the value of this alternative. For example:
SERGE extracts new source content, renders it for translation and obtains translated text. Then, it integrates the translated text back into the product. In addition to automatically pulling and pushing changes, it can also sync with your preferred external CAT tool.
Some good tools for this purpose include Xbench, QA built-in CAT and Verifika. QA spot checks prior to QA are an additional expense, so it's recommended to include them in the budget upfront (basic machine translation may also give you a useful look at your localized game product, and may even reveal opportunities for interim design modifications).
5. Manage budgeting and legal considerations
It may seem like legal and budget particulars are too far removed from the pre-production process to talk about their effects on accurate localization. Nevertheless, keep in mind that in order to hit the ground running when entering the localization phase of the project, you'll need to ensure that all the administrative components of the project are managed efficiently.
When completion of one of these critical preliminary parts of the project lag, timelines can be impacted, confusion and misunderstandings can emerge, and localization quality can become the casualty of the improperly controlled situation. So make sure that localization vendor agreements that spell out all of the arrangements have been established and that amounts of resources are settled prior to scheduling production.
Getting all details settled with vendors before the project starts helps avoid unforeseen expenses leading to cost overruns and unexpected delays. Get all legal contracts thoroughly completed early to speed the process along on your current and future projects.
6. Start collecting feedback
Start collecting feedback from gamers about titles similar to yours and note the user ratings and comments. Learning about customer satisfaction issues due to errors can help you identify some root causes, which can be valuable during your own game development, including the localization phase.
Consider actively gathering feedback on your game to find out what can be tweaked and what, if anything, is likely to influence the overall accuracy and quality of localization. To increase your wealth of feedback, you might even opt to give users an incentive, such as a little in-game currency. It's an idea to run by your development team.
Figure out what you can do to reach out to your players that can be effective across a userbase of multilingual gamers and implement some method of thanking people for taking the time to provide important feedback to improve your game. Plus, engaging customers in this way is a good brand builder.
A basic rule it to simply be on the lookout for common mistakes. Be sure to add these typical errors to your localization quality checklist to help you overcome typical challenges in games localization:
Enculturation is a localization fundamental that makes game content more natural and meaningful to users, which adds a genuine and relatable quality to the game for every user in any remote locale. That's a significant value that benefits users and developers.
So, collaborate with knowledgeable people in and outside the project team about the relatability of the game's plot, objects, characters, text, dialogue and voiceover characteristics to blend relevant game elements with cultural references and avoid errors regarding cultural sensitivities in order to optimize the user experience. It is recommended to begin efforts toward enculturating game content as early as possible in the development process.
For maximizing accuracy and the overall quality of the localization project, emphasis is needed on getting as much as possible done as early as possible. Many avoidable mistakes are consequences of unnecessarily rushing through processes (or pushing development into the infamous "crunch time"). Quality work is always easier to achieve when processes are managed through professional project planning and are executed with maximum care.
The more time that is available at every stage of the process, the more attention can be lavished on finer details. The differences in the level of such care in localization are often what distinguish run-of-the-mill game products distributed in international markets from high-quality, culturally immersive games that inspire gamers throughout the world.
Determine whether your game's development is at the stage of maturity that makes game localization the logical next step or if there needs to be more preparation before handing it over to a localizing team. While at first glance it may seem that phases of the project, like budgeting and legal constructs, have little or nothing at all to do with localization quality, those are the frameworks within which a successful project is planned and executed. So, have those matters settled before you embark on localization.
Be sure to focus test all images with target international audiences to help mitigate unintended cultural offenses. The IGDA reminds developers and localizers to be aware of national, regional and local geo-political issues, as well as historical, ethnic and religious considerations.
Finally, learn from the mistakes of other industry professionals. Spend some time reading peer articles and educate yourself on some of the ins and outs of localization to give yourself every advantage going into the process. This will help you manage your expectations, collaborate most creatively and productively, stay on budget and on schedule, and produce the best possible outcome in accuracy and overall quality of your localization project.
If you are looking toward localizing your video game and would like some expert advice on accuracy and localization quality management, give us a call anytime to discuss your game and how to realize your vision for it.
For more insights into games localization, visit our Ultimate Guide to Games Translation.