Quick update, last night I gather all the information that is going to be presented in final presentation and created a prezi presentation for the team to practice and do the final changes during this afternoon.
And this is how thingsd ended after today’s work
I finished the language menu, but for some wird reason I couldn’t publish it in GitHub during the weekend.
This is how it started as you can see in the left and with the input of Jay and Anish ended like in the right.
Once the player selects the language we pass to the menu where we get the title translated and the icons that help to minimise the translation needed which helps localisation to be a little bit cheaper.
As for the code needed I started with trying to keep the selected language in a game object that survived every change of scene, but the Anish showed me the PlayersPrefs, and voila! the code became super small and easy. I even got to erase one script that was now obsolete.
We chose to translate:
So I ask some friends to help me translateting; For french I asked Amelie my French teacher back in México, she is french, with german Yunus from my Russian Class helped me and for Russian my Russian Teacher help with the translations.
Marius investigated the other languages.
For the game Title Die Next Day
For Game Over:
For Day Completed, which is the success message:
I created the sprites needed for the game localisation
I attended to an event called Interface 2015, there I got to several small conferences where they talked about where to get money for your games and what is there to be considere in order to help your game to be successful.
Among other things that were mentioned, localisation of games was almost always an important topic.
First Garry Williams from SoldOut said that localisation of a game should at least consider these languages to get to lot of people.
He also mentioned that even if it sounds odd Poland and Russia have are places where night life ends early and videogames are the only alternative so we have also that factor to consider when localisating a game.
From the conference called “How to reach global markets” with Gareth Wiliams from Premier PR, Tobias Jost from Marchsreiter Communications and Victor Perez from VPCom, I learned that to get to people in UK, France and Germany we have to localise, however these 3 have huge differences on how to get to players and they stated clearly that:
There were to many things consider here and I have the impression that culturalisation and localisation are becoming the same thing so we need to provide easy ways to help on translation matters or alternatives to it so there’s more time for developer studios to find ways to culturalise their games.
The International Games Developers Association (igda) created a document called Best Practices for Game Localisation, and this document covers
But lets talk about localisation for now; according to igda localization is the process of creating a product suited to a specific locale.
This means a lot of work since it affects almost al parts involved in a game development, like assets, texts, dialogs or voices which have to be translated in order to localise them.
And like they say divide an conquer, igda also recomends us to break down the process in 6 stages.
First is to familiarise with the project and here applies the example Miguel Ángel Bernal gave us in his lecture; it is IMPOSIBLE to expect a great translation if we take the translators out of context, they must know all there is to know about the scene they are about to work on, however this might be limited by the time and budget available.
This stage should at least consider a minimum of 3 days of game testing if we are talking of a small project and the bigger the project is the bigger the amount of time should me in testing translations and allowing staff to get to know the story.
Then we have Glossary and Style Guide Creation, where another kind of familiarisation happens, here the development team gives the translator all the information they might need to create their own target language’s glossary and style guide on, like a terms and pronunciations; if the job is on a sequel then it’s important to have all translation work done for the previous game in order to keep the feel of the same world; this process involves a lot of brainstorming and documentation from all the translators and they must be able to get hold of the development team in case of questions or doubts.
On time invested on this stage may vary from a week to 6 weeks, although this may not be enough to cover the 100% of the job it should be enough to get major guide lines and policies for the translation.
Once that job is done comes the third stage and here is where the real translation happens; it is good if all translators check each other work so they don’t overlap and it is highly recommended to use specialized editors that can help ensuring there is consistency.
Now here I will let you see the set of specialist they recommend for each area of translation:
In terms of productivity you have to set goals and equivalents for translations, and setting these might take a few tries because there are too many factors to consider, like the time it takes to listen to a piece of audio and read the transcript or translate in a way that fits on how much lip synching.
This stage will take a lot of time of checking the timing of the subtitles and other related stuff matches the timing in the game.
Forth stage is the voice over production, here the information can become unmanageable so the development team needs to be ready and here is where the subtitle timing thing changes to voice.
Here you can request fir budget, have to be careful with the files of the translation scripts, make sure they can be read in all translation studios. You also have to be very organised and prepare the scripts by marking which lines require timing with lip synching and reference them to their corresponding video for example.
It is also important to consider the cast, in order to localise the game better we cannot be cheap on this matter, we need feeling and good voice actors.
And of course there is the need to be also very VERY organised in the saving referencing, etc. of the new audio files produced in this stage.
To assure the linguistic quality there has to be a test period, where it is highly recommended to have linguists from the target language to play the game and make comments, notes or suggestions and of course this means translators have to be available to do last minute changes; and they also have to play in order to male sure their work has been included in the final product and that it is correctly placed. This is the fifth and sixth stage.
Some of this stages can be done simultaneously but there has to be a great communication on each team.
S. Bonfils, D. Campbell, A. Dellepiane, K. Edwards (SIG founder/chair), E. d’Engelbronner, J. Fung (editor, version 2.0), R. Honeymoon (SIG vice-chair; author, version 1.0), R. Klischewski, V. A. Lion, E. Lopez, T. Luppino, F. Minazzi (SIG vice-chair), V. Petrarca, A. Santambrogio, M. Schmidt, T. Slattery, D. Solbiati and S. Williams, “Game Localization Best Practices v2,” 28 02 2012. [Online]. Available: https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/65D89F6D-3BD8-46EA-B32E-BE34236408D5/Best-Practices-for-Game-Localization-v21.pdf.
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