yanuart:
I don't wanna know what "hindernissenparcous" (19 chars word ???) means anyway and i think most game developers act like I do.

Hindernissenparcours (20 characters) means "obstacle course" ;) Dutch merely becomes so long because it's an agglutinating language. That's a very difficult way to say that we write words like "obstacle course" as "obstaclecourse" (one word).

I have been reading a lot on this forum and I feel your pain. I understand especially small developers are not leading an easy life, financially that is. I never considered you guys as cheapskates either - if that were the case, I'd be doing IT translations for big SAP companies that love paying 0.40 euro per word (they think it looks cool to spend four times as much on translations).

The main reason why I entered the game industry is out of passion. Not for the money. There are much better jobs out there if I want to get rich. But of course, I need to pay my mortgage too :D

Anyway, consider this: what do you prefer? A bad localization? Or no localization at all? My advice in such case would be to keep the money in your pocket, negotiate something else which means more to your company, and not localize at all.

XML is indeed a fantastic format to work with, also for translators.

By the way, you just made me realize that I also should write some sections aimed at game publishers, as indeed these tend to make lots of decisions about localization lately.

===

PCosmin89:
I'm not sure what you're aiming at... that's exactly what I'm saying ;) And it is not a good thing, by the way. Proofreading does not mean unifying style - it means checking grammar and spelling. You need one end person to unify the style afterwards and there's no way he or she can process 100.000 words on one day. Maybe I should clarify that part a bit, if it was unclear. Was this indeed what you were aiming at?

===

Alamar:
You clearly have experience with this and I couldn't agree more!

[Edited by - Yomar on August 2, 2006 2:30:42 PM]

Write games in english is enough. Today's gamers are able to understand it, no matter which country they are from.

I meet many people that prefers a good written game in english, than a bad translated game in spanish.

Quote: Original post by leoptimus
Write games in english is enough. Today's gamers are able to understand it, no matter which country they are from.

I meet many people that prefers a good written game in english, than a bad translated game in spanish.

I really enjoyed reading the article i must say, certainly something to keep in the back of my mind.

However i tend to agree with leoptimus on this point. Some localized games can get me frustrated. An example, a race game i saw lately, i think it was Gotham City racing or something: when you'd crash your car it would display CRASH!!! which sounds pretty cool. However it was translated in Dutch as "BOTSING!!!" which, quite frankly, isn't cool at all :)
And sometimes they try to localize a slang word. But in translation they'd use a word that my mother would use :) No offense what so ever :)

I think that in game localization isn't always preferable. Manuals: ok, japanese to english: please, translating "Nice!" into "Aardig!" (while nice is used in dutch by the kids as well): please... don't :)

Great article though.
Groeten!

Great article. I am suprised that not encoding text directly into code wasn't higher on the list as that would be the most obvious one. Good to know that you added it on there though :-) I have to start thinking about localization for my current project so I'm glad I ran accross this article.

I have a question, in the situation where text is baked into a texture/image, how would you recommend handling that? For instance creating a series of tutorial/help images in a program like Photoshop/Paintshop. Would your advice be just to not do it like that...or maybe to save the master image in a way that the text can be edited later, and the image re-saved?

The array of possible effects that can be applied to the text/image is greatly increased if the text isn't rendered in realtime. I'm just curious how you would handle that situation.

Keep up the good work, you obviously know your translating!

- Dan

Leoptimus:
I totally agree that a bad localization is worse than no localization at all. It's one of my credos.

Limitz:
It's indeed true that the "old" generation of gamers has grown up with English games and prefers playing games in English. And even as a translator I totally agree that if your English is good enough, you should always try to play a game in the original language it was written (be it English, German, French, Japanese or whatsoever). Hey, it's what I do myself :D

There's a whole bunch of people out there that we don't see on any forums though. I call them the silent majority. They're casual gamers (still playing about 20 hours a week) and their English is not that good (or even non-existant). You don't meet them very often, as they prefer socializing in bars rather than exchanging views on forums. These people make up about 40% of the market. Many of them got into gaming after buying their first mobile phone - it came pre-packaged with a few games, and they apparently liked what they saw.

Game publishers have discovered this new market and game localization is here to stay.

You're absolutely right if you say that the results of several game localizations have been absolutely disastrous. The translation industry has a very bad reputation indeed. It's a very young industry and the good still haven't been separated from the bad. The game localization industry is even younger and very often localizations are carried out by people who have no clue about "game speech" and their target audience. It's indeed true that these people tend to soften up their translations a lot. I say we should call a spoon a spoon. If someone is called a "son of a bitch" in game, then he's a "gore klootzak", not "een vervelend mannetje".

It's important to cater to both hardcore gamers (who want the original English version) and casual gamers (who just want to play without studying dictionaries). So I always advise my clients to at least enable people to choose in which language they want to play the game: English or Dutch. That way everybody is happy.

On the other hand, bad localizations in the past and the fact that people are merely not familiar with Dutch gaming terminology also cause another phenomenon: which is that especially hardcore gamers tend to critisize any translation no matter how good it is. This is the other extreme: there's nothing wrong with calling a spoon a spoon (a lepel) in Dutch :) Other terms like "Game Over" have become so standard however, that they should not be touched by any translator. It is indeed a very sensitive subject that should be handled with care.

dgreen02:
I'm probably going to move that one a bit more up ;)

What I would recommend in your case is to save editable versions of the images. Many agencies and some freelancers offer support for software like Adobe Photoshop, so if you make sure you keep the different layers editable and don't "flatten" the images, we should be able to edit and translate them directly. Due to the extra work involved though, the rate for these images would be higher than the normal rate. After all, we do have to open the files, edit them, and resave them - that's a lot of work if you consider most images only contain a few words.

If your budget is tight, another possibility is to retype all translations in Excel or Word, have them translated and paste them back yourself. Do have the images checked by your agency/freelancer though, as sometimes terrible things happen :D

Thank you for the kind words!

[Edited by - Yomar on August 3, 2006 3:40:12 AM]

:)

I had no idea the silent majority was so large, so you're probably right. And those are probably the people that actually buy your games in stead of just ripping them from kazaa or something :)

I don't actually think there is anything wrong with localization, as long as it is an option. I will definitly incorporate your guidelines into my current project by the way :)

Greetings.

And those are probably the people that actually buy your games in stead of just ripping them from kazaa or something

Exactly. Most of them probably don't even know what Kazaa is :D And I totally agree that localization should always be an option, never a fait accomplit.

I dunno about game developers but we had a problem where the original programmers did not really take into account issues like character encoding (english to japanese) they used functions/fonts/etc suited for english/ASCII text. When we tried to convert to japanese it all came out as garbage. OF course having several encoding schemes does not help at all (EUC-JP,SJIS,etc). At least using language/location aware functions goes a lot in preventing these problems.

Cheers!

True Yapposai! It isn't really an issue for localizations to Dutch, but if you're localizing your game to Japanese or Chinese, this can have tremendous consequences.

We're writing the year 2006 and I think that by now, ASCII should be forbidden and totally replaced by Unicode, even if your game is only in English. You never know what you will do in the future, and Unicode offers support for all languages. Of course, you will still need to integrate different fontsets for (what we consider as) exotic languages, but that's a lot easier than rewriting your code from scratch.

I'm going to add this one, even though it doesn't really apply to my language combinations.

Interesting article from the point of view of a hobbyist who's never experienced any of this.

So, three days is obviously not enough for a manual. What is a reasonable amount of time to translate an entire game (including manual and anything else)?