Improving Game Localization Quality: Internationalization as the Holy Grail

Improving Game LocalizationQuality: Internationalizationas the Holy Grail

Pablo Muñoz@pmstrad

In previous presentations,I talked about…

Thein-housetranslator

TheDark Sidetranslator(freelancer)

Thedeveloper

ThePM

And now I will talkabout…

Thelocalizationengineers

In small projects, they may be forgotten…

But if you decide to work with them…

They will fight so that you followthese 10 internationalization principles

1.You shall design

text boxesand menus

for larger texts

Poor menu design for localization…

Better menu design for localization

Good text box for localization…

But bad button design for localization!

2.You shall test ALL fontswith special characters

Where’s the ‘ñ’?

3.You shall use

variable width fontsas much as possible

Courier New is a fixed width font

Calibri is avariable width font

• This is Arial• This is Arial Narrow• This is Times New Roman• This is Garamond•This is Courier New• This is Calibri

Fixed width Font = less space

Variable width Font = more space

Some more examples

Final Fantasy VI – SNES version

Final Fantasy VI – GBA version

Chrono Trigger – SNES version

Chrono Trigger – Android version

4.You shall usetext wrapping

instead of manualline breaks

Becausemanual line breaks

are a pain

Accidents and text overflows occur…

And sometimes they aren’t necessary

Even better:Make speech bubbles

adapt to the text

A normal text bubble…

That expands itself based on the content!

And this waytranslators will use CAT tools easily

5.You shall use different

messages fornumerical variables

Why not just “1 tech point”?

punto(s) is correct… but not nice

This can be avoidedby just adding a message

for 1 and for >1

6.You shall always include

a variable in the full string

Let’s translate “ escaped!” into Spanish

Oops! Where’s the initial ‘¡’?

Do:<name> escaped!

Don’t:escaped!

7.You shall create

special tagsto avoid gender issues

English:

GUARD: Let’s see if you areas good as they say.

Spanish:

GUARDIA: Vamos a ver si erestan bueno como dicen.

But if your main character is a woman…

Should be “buena”

Solution:GUARDIA: Vamos a ver si eres

tan @Malebueno@Femalebuena@End

como dicen.

8.You shall use variables

and tagsthat humans can read

This simple message can be represented like…

This:[fnt_2]Oh! My aching head...[fnt_1] Hey, Dk! The

other kingdoms have taken all our[col_02]bananas[col_01] [icn_1] away![kp]

Or even like this:[小]Oh! My aching head...[大] Hey, Dk! The

other kingdoms have taken all our[橙]bananas[黒] [バナナ_01] away![kp]

Or this way :)[Font_size=60%]Oh! My aching

head...[Font_size=100%] Hey, Dk! Theother kingdoms have taken all our

[Font_color=orange]bananas[Font_color=black] [Banana_Icon_3] away![KeyPress]

9.You shall be organized

with files and Excel tabs

Have you ever seen a file with 50 tabs like this?

Or zillions of very small files?

Yeah… That’s how translators usually react

So…

10.You shall check

for cultural issues

To avoid things like this in Pokémon ASAP

JP version US version

And this in Super Mario RPG

JP version US version

So don’t think twice:a good internationalization

is the key for a sucessfullocalization

Hire and trust a localization engineer…

And may the Force be with you!

Thank you for your attention

@pmstrad pablomunoz.com