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Inside Video Game Localization
Atlus USA is a company known for their skill at localizing games — that is, adapting the text and speech in a game to a different language or culture. They've written a summary of their timeline for modifying a game, explaining that it's much more complicated than just running everything by a translator. They also have other articles looking at various parts of their work with more detail. When work begins, they take a few weeks to familiarize themselves with the game, giving them the proper context to understand character interactions and names. The actual translation then takes anywhere from a week to a few months, depending on how much material there is and whether they need to bring in new voice actors. Another month or so is allotted to actually implementing the changes and making technical modifications, after which another month or two is dedicated to bug testing. Then the game is submitted back to its original manufacturer for approval, a process that can take two months, and finally the new discs and game boxes are created, which adds another month. Thus, what many gamers see as a "simple" localization process can take six months or more to complete.
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It's very nice to read the whole process, but as a publisher I would bear in mind, at least for PC games, that the biggest problem is to get a world-wide release on time: if a game is published in English and people need to wait before being able to buy the game just because of localization; then, a lot of people is going to download the game, in a legal or non-legal way. That's a side effect of building hype around a game, I guess :)
You can see the same thing with "big" movies: lots of them are release more on less the same week in lots of different markets, just to avoid people downloading the movie if they can not watch it in a local cinema.
If the game is developed with localization in mind during production, there's no reason the localized version cant ship at almost the same date as the English. I've shipped ~20 games that have been localized and the EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) version has never been more than about 1 month after the English release.
I live in belgium, and i've never played a game in dutch. It's always been in english. If it's the original language, it just makes more sence. If the game has been ported, then quite often the english still sounds/reads better. I've once seen a dutch version of a sci-fi game; it was horrible.
I know every country is different. I live in the Netherlands, where tv shows and movies are NOT dubbed, but subtitled instead. Every kid in school learns English.
Yet, every game on the shelves appears to be translated to Dutch nowadays. Thank God not the software itself, but the packaging and manuals are all Dutch everywhere. I asked around a bit amongst friends, but nobody understands why they exactly do this. For the small percentage of kids games who don't understand English, we can understand, but why translate the paperwork of Grand Theft Auto IV? The target audience has learned English in school, watches English on tv anyway, and the game itself is English as well. On the other side, the manual is written as a tourist guide to Liberty City, with sarcastic remarks between the lines about how crap the city is... But all these are lost in translation.
Why do they even bother? If nothing else is translated on our (tv) screens?
EA learned a hard lesson with the first Black & White game, one of the few games that got translated completely to Dutch. After a storm of complaints from just about everyone, they offered exchanging discs for a native English version, and later even offered separate voice pack downloads. It's not the the voices are bad (which they weren't, honestly) but nobody wanted a Dutch version in the fist place.
I'm not a native English speaker, but I always take the (usually original) English version over the one translated into my own language. This goes with operating systems, desktop applications, games and so on. I absolutely hate using something like that in my own language. Either the translations suck, use incomprehensible and made up words, or especially in games just sound so stupid that it completely breaks the immersion. Whenever I have to use a localized version of anything, I'm usually completely lost.
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But maybe that's just me.
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This could be the most obvious article I've ever seen posted on /.
There are interesting things about localization, such as not being able to write the message like:
because in other languages, the greetee might come before the greeting. Instead, you have to make sure your app is coded to work with full sentences, using something like:
Likewise, issues like presenting dates, times, and currencies in local formats are interesting. But this article superficially ignores that stuff. Instead, it seems to be an advert along the lines of "we do good localised ports. Let us do your next game."
The thing that annoys me about localisation is when here in the UK we have to wait an extra month or two after the US release and the game hasn't had the spelling mistakes fixed (things like color, etc.). This is especially annoying when the game is made by a British team.
You've got to give credit to Atlus - they've done a good job bringing the Shin Megami Tensei series over to the western world, especially when Final Fantasy gets way more attention. But they did a hatchet job on Maken X - to the point where the plot was incomprehensible and the voice acting was laughable. Still, it's good to see that they're working so hard at a job that so many other companies do so wrong. Jaleco's USA division didn't even try to translate stories in most cases. They did one of the worse localization jobs in history when they brought over the third game in Rushing Beat series.
Reading about Atlus's localization process really makes me miss Working Designs, who no one really properly appreciated for their localization efforts.
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Where this gets hard is in the non-game arena. Dialogs and buttons and menu options originally designed for Japanese, will not normally scale well when you have to translate 2 kanji into a few words. That stretches things, which makes it overlap other items which, when not programmed correctly from the start with translation in mind, makes things a major headache.
A lot of Japanese programs I use have very compact interfaces since, in Japanese, you can compress an entire sentence or meaning into just a few characters, whereas with English this would take an entire sentence. It's really a pain in the arse.
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I don't miss the fact it usually took years for a game to get translated by them. (Oh, and I actually liked the humor they'd inject. True it wasn't in the original game but it usually got a chuckle out of me.)
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Why isn't localisation considered part of the actual development process, just like user interface design, graphics, music, etc.?
Because translation costs time==money. If you were developing free software in Europe, would you want the law to require all software published by a European entity to come with translations into all 23 languages of the European Union, even at version 0.01?
[In a non-Pokemon related work,] They had used the same voice actor as the one who did Misty in the Dutch translated version of the Pokemon tv show.
Yeah, that totally didn't ruin any immersion..
Did it also ruin immersion when Tim Allen played Tim Taylor in Home Improvement, Santa Claus in The Santa Clause trilogy, and Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story?
I'm American, and speak only English. When I bought the movie "Run Lola Run", it had both the English voice-overs and the original German with English subs. The voice-over was honestly excellent and couldn't have been done better, but I still preferred the sound of the original German.
I think I would like to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in a similar way - with the original Russian being spoken with English subtitles. Normally this sort of reverse localization isn't done, but I see there's a mod for that, which I might experiment with:
http://stalker.filefront.com/file/In_Game_CC_and_Subtitles_for_Oblivion_Lost_22%3B97756
"After installing InGameCC you can bravely replace all sounds to Russian with Authenticity Sound Pack or a similar sound mod..."
... they provide original english and japanese voices AND subtitles.
It also helps that SF4 was designed from the start for both japanese and english speaking markets.
Even though I have quibles with the voice over work since I've seen so many SF anime movies with different voice actors (the ones who did the anime that came with the collectors edition of the game in english sucked pretty bad).
Capcom and Sony usually have done pretty alright voice work, it's finally good to see original japanese + subtitle options.
I really wished over PS2 RPG's went that route, although if you want to see OUTSTANDING localization check out level 5's rogue galaxy, that game is effin amazing in terms of what they did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Galaxy
Whenever I play a J-RPG the first thing I do if there is an option is set the voice acting to Japanese with English subs. It makes the game a whole lot better I have found. I don't mind watching subbed versions of anything, especially when the dubbed version is usually terrible. And then you have the issues of fan translations for the older RPGs that end up failing whenever they release the "official" version (though I do think Bartz is better than Butz)
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I bought the French version of Oblivion and it was simply awful. ...
For example, they translated the Weighing scale and the Fish scale with the same word : ecaille
I don't speak about the voices, the missing dialogues, etc.
All the game was like this and there is no way to buy to an English version in France.
And to make it worse, you have to wait longer and pay more for a game of lesser quality.
I you can speak English and want to play the game with all the content, either you buy it on the net and have to pay the shipping or get it on P2P.
Quite sad
There are so many games that have Japanese origins that have grammatically correct English, but the text ends up being things you couldn't imagine anyone actually saying. It made me realize that sentences need to convey ideas according to common practices more than they need to be completely accurate.
The older Final Fantasy games were notorious for this (you spoony bard). Modern Final Fantasy titles (10, 11, Advent Children) have gotten extremely good. There is only one line I can remember in Advent Children that felt out of place and the voice acting as a whole was exceptional.
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Then how does [an actor on a well-known U.S. sitcom] know all the good Bavarian jokes?
It's called Woolseyism: the translation team recognizes a U.S. joke and slaps in a Bavarian joke for the Bavarian voice actor to tell. See Woolseyism on TV Tropes for more examples.
color is a spelling mistake in the English langusge.
Not as much as langusge is a spelling mistake in the English language. More seriously, Latin and Spanish also have color without 'u', but French has even more 'u's in couleur. Where did British English "colour" with only one 'u' come from?
The older Final Fantasy games were notorious for this (you spoony bard).
There's nothing wrong with the "spoony bard" line. The character being spoken to was a bard, and he was being weepy and emotional over what had just happened to another character.
Maybe you just aren't familiar with the word, but it makes more sense to say in that setting than calling him "emo" or whatever. Also, it adds more to the situation than literally translating the original text, where he just insulted him with profanity.
At least you're talking about a series designed for a general audience.
It's been almost 10 years, and I'm still waiting for Segagaga. (A game about the gaming industry, specifically, the Sony vs. Sega marketshare battles of the early 2000s. The parallels with modern-day EA are disturbingly - yet hilariously - prophetic. I can't read a byte of Japanese, but the screenshots say it all.)
NTSC to PAL conversion can be a major problem on console games, I have a collection of adventure style games at home that had some kind of speed challenge in them where you have to beat the clock on a specific event where the 'clock' is slightly sped up running on a PAL system to the point where even perfect execution is not fast enough. Incredibly frustrating.
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The same can't be said for other language versions of the latest Final Fantasy series. Speaking of the Italian versions, which I've seen, the translation is incredibly sloppy and sometimes (with regards to naming) follows language conventions that are flat out wrong (e.g. Italian can't form compound words with the same frequency as English, and there are a lot of them in the text).
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I agree whole-heartedly on the quality of the translations of the Shin Megami Tensei series.
Playing Persona 3: FES, the thing that struck me the most about the character interactions was that they were so natural. Considering that the game setting is modern times in an urban area, the dialogue was teenager slang. In most games, attempts at slang are heavy-handed and laughable.
The dialogue in Persona 3 was incredibly natural sounding though, which is a feat I thought impossible!
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The point was that it was a line that no-one would ever actually say, not that it was incorrect. On top of that it was being used as an insult which doesn't make any sense given the meaning.
They built it for Asian players and are translating into Western culture and language. As of the last round of Beta, all the voices are still Japanese (sounding). So the female avatars all sound like 13 year old girls. i suspect that will change soon. There's also a rather anime style to the game.
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