The International Games Developers Association (igda) created a document called Best Practices for Game Localisation, and this document covers
- Culturalization
- Internationalisation
- Localisation
- Project Planning
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:
- Asian languages:
1 editor to 3 translators
- European languages
1 editor to up to 4 translators for.
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.
References
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.
dsphero6.wordpress.com 