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.

Comments

Re:World-wide release

[rolfwind]

Simultaneous worldwide release is nice if you know the game will be a hit, otherwise it's doubling down your gamble needlessly, imo. Besides, if the foreign gamers are so desperate to pirate it by downloading it, might as well just offer it for sale (download) to all takers the way things are going with digital media. Only problem with that is if your game runs afoul of some laws in country X - say Germany's ban on blood in video games.

Why?

[Amarantine]

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.

Re:Why?

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe the law requires documentation, at least, to be in the local language?

Re:Why?

[gaspyy]

Same thing in my country (Romania). For some reason everyone prefers subtitles. One big TV network tried about 10 years ago to dub a soap opera... they spent a fortune on advertising but everyone hated it - it was such a massive flop no one ever tried it again. I have some dubbed Disnay movies but they translated the songs too - and guess what, my 5 year old son prefers the originals.

As for software, I know a few people forced to use translated Office versions. All of them grumble as they need to map the terminology used.

Good translations are hard, especially when the source material is heavy; this is apparent when works of the same author are translated by different people. LoTR had a wonderful translation, while The Hobbit, although technically correct, had no 'flavour'. To stay in the realm of fantasy and give you an example, the name 'Diagon Alley' from Harry Potter missed it completely.

Re:Why?

[JJJK]

That's still better than in Germany, where they dub ALL the movies and tv shows. It sounds awful, and many things get lost in translation, including acting, jokes and meaning. The best you can hope for are DVDs where you can switch to original audio and use subtitles if you don't speak the original language.

Games are even worse. When they are dubbed they get even more horrible voice actors. We use a lot of english words for recently developed things, but those tend to get translated as well, making the whole thing look really weird. And like that's not enough, games are considered to be the root of all evil over here and either get censored or banned. So if you want to experience a game like the developers intended (and endanger your fragile little mind), you need to buy it somewhere else, like the UK.

I really envy all countries where there is no dubbing (The polish idea of dubbing is a little different, but it doesn't suck any less). Imagine all B+-list-actors each had like one of three different voices. Just that nobody seems to care, since everybody grew up with it.

Re:Why?

[CrashNBrn]

That's easy enough to understand, just compare the English dubbed Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon to the original with subtitling. Albeit some in my direct family prefer the English version. I literally couldn't stand it. When you take something that is Art and dub it, it becomes something else - more easily digestible media perhaps. Easy to digest, and bland.

Captain Obvious

[CarpetShark]

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:

print greeting + " " + greetee

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:

print_with_named_args(greeting_message, greetee="John")

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."

Re:Captain Obvious

[zalas]

For problems such as variable placement of variables, there's two ways I've seen it done, at least in Japanese Windows games. One is for a smart parser in the game engine, which turns your example into something like:

1. print "Hello, $charactername1, how are you doing today?"

Another choice is to separately issue text display commands and insert a special text display command in the middle:

1. print "Hello, "
2. printcharactername 1
3. print ", how are you doing today?"

This can be reduced to the previous problem by having a smart script compiler handle wildcards instead of the game engine. In either case, while this is interesting, I don't think the general audience for which the original article was written would be interested in that much detail.

As for your points on currency, dates and times, Atlus USA as far as I know does primarily JP->US localization. For "nonfictional" dates, times and currencies, there's a pretty straightforward conversion, depending on what the editor decides to do (leave in Japanese style or convert to American style). For "fictional" dates, times and currencies, I don't think it's that big of a problem, since those are just directly carried through. This is either trivial or too detailed for the typical reader of the article to enjoy, in my opinion.

Overall, I think the article presented a very good bird's eye view of the process, and I think it would be interesting for a more detailed article for localization aficionados.

Why don't they convert games to English?

[necronom426]

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.

Re:All your base...

[troll8901]

"All your base are belong to us" is perfectly grammatically-correct in Chinese and possibly other languages. It might not be perfect, but it's still understandable.

I'd be glad if computer translation of 2009 can produce such accurate results! Look at what Google and Babelfish says.

Google: "You are our base, all you CATS."
Babelfish: "Everything CATS received your base."

Atlus

[lyinhart]

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.

Re:Atlus

[lbbros]

who no one really properly appreciated for their localization efforts.

Perhaps because they inserted a lot of things that weren't even loosely related with the original text? Adaptation is one thing, inserting pop culture references were they aren't there another.

Re:Atlus

[Toonol]

That's the goal of the adaption. They aren't trying for academic veracity; they're making an entertainment product. When the original game has an obscure joke comparing a Japanese pop idol to a historical figure from the Heian period, the translators will (and should) make an entirely different joke based on Britney Spears and Can-Can dancers... or maybe something entirely unrelated, which still works for characterization and plot. The craft and style of the translated product is more important than the accuracy.

Where this gets hard

[Pikoro]

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.

I miss WD too but

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Street fighter 4 PC does localization right...

[blahplusplus]

... 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