Game localization: battle in the real world

Once Mass Effect 3 has been announced to be released in Korea, many of Korean gamers were demanding the localized version of the new Mass Effect series. Since the game has a tone of texts for dialogues, descriptions and UIs, the language is the key to fully enjoy the game. There are many games released without the localization in Korean market. Some users pay extra cost to buy a textbook in which there are translations for all dialogues and tips for walkthrough for the title they want to play. So I just wondered how the game localization is done and what kind of effort is needed.

Call of duty: Modern warfare 3 Korean patch. I don't believe this is officially released by Activision. This shows why the localization service is needed.

Planning
First of all, decision makers in the game company will decide whether they will localize their titles for local markets or globalize them for the international market. Once it’s decided, the localization project manager will plan entire schedule for the localization and assign appropriate resources for each stages on the localization process. For example, one or multiple translators or vendors (plus editors and QA specialists) might be needed to translate all texts including UIs, descriptions, dialogues, user manual, official website and packages. If the voice recording is needed, the voice actors and the recording studio will be needed. Normally this planning process must be done before the game released or during the developing stage.

TEP: Translation + Editing + Proofreading
Translation is a vital part of the localization. For the successful localization, the translator must fully understand all contents of the game to localize. However, it is not true that translation resources always understand every context of strings to translate, especially for the game. Translators sometimes receive only strings to translate without any reference materials, especially when they translate system strings like UIs for options, inventories or system messages which will be normally translated first or on the earlier stage during the project. Some games like role playing games or simulation games have numerous in-game texts and, it is definitely a challenging task to translate all those texts following the tight schedule. The project manager could assign multiple resources to translate texts to meet the deadline though the consistency is still one of the major issue to deal with.

These main menu UIs would be translated in the early stage of the localization process. Unfortunately "Wanted: Weapons of fate" was not localized in Korean version.

Bug fixing & QA
Humans are not perfect so we always make mistakes. QA specialists and engineers search for problems on translated strings and files where translation is implemented. This is a time consuming task so QA specialists and engineers need patience and sedulousness. There would be a lot of feedbacks and communications among linguists and QA specialists and engineers for fixing mistranslations, refining translations, modifying translated strings to fit in the layout of the interface and vice versa or, fixing the text which went Cyrillic. If there is any voice-over content, there will be a whole lot more work to be done on this stage.

A terrible typo error is found in "King of Fighters 13". It made "game data" read as "gay data".

So there will be huge efforts from many people to make a well localized title in the market that would be attractive to gamers to put the title on their “must-buy” list. However, market situation, the reality does not always allow companies to decide to proceed the localization of their titles.

Reality bites
When PS2 was officially released in Korea in 2002, many people in relevant industries expected that Korean gaming market would be extended and richer than before. Especially people in the localization field anticipated that there would be more business opportunities for the game localization service.It looked like successful in the beginning since many Japanese and American game companies actively put their resources for the localization of their titles to succeed the promotion in Korean market. However, the sales did not rewarded their efforts and, the localization has become one of minor options as the time has gone by.

In the end, there will be only chaos...
I don’t know. May be... Chaos does not mean the total collapse of the market. It means the irregularity of opportunities that crowds the market. There are some companies which are still challenging for good localizations of their titles. Meanwhile, Korean gaming market cannot guarantee the ROI for their efforts. The niche market has arisen while the pessimistic perspective has become dominant with traditional platforms such as PC and console including Playstation, Xbox and Wii in Korean market. Localization demands for mobile games for smartphones and tablet PCs like iPad have been dramatically increased these days. Downloadable arcade games for Playstation and Xbox 360 are also new business opportunities for the localization service. I believe that localization service providers can build new types of solutions for these types of games and provide them in different ways in the market.

Introducing E4NET

E4NET is a localization & globalization service company based in Seoul, Korea. The company provides full localization services including translation, editing, proofreading, DTP, QA & testing, compiling, audio recording, etc.The interesting thing is the company has two different business divisions. One is Translation & Globalization division and the other one is Service & Consulting division. E4NET is a key player in the localization service industry in Korea though their IT service and consulting business is taking the bigger portion of the total sales.

Solving Problems Related to Cleaning Files in Trados Studio 2009

We sometimes face some problems when we try to clean up translated ttx files. This article is introducing some tips to address those issues. However, it does not matter if you work on SDLX translation files (.itd files).

Here is the link: http://translation-blog.trustedtranslations.com/solving-problems-related-to-cleaning-files-in-trados-studio-2009-2012-02-28.html

Booties from Loc World in Barcelona, Spain

One of my colleages brought these two books from Loc World in Barcelona. Thanks for booties buddy!

Language Weaver

Language Weaver was a software company that developed the real-time machine translation solution. As you see the video in below, the company provided the solution for the government and corporates.

This video was created January 21st 2007 and Language Weaver was acquired by SDL in 2010.

Patricia Ryan on TED: Mind your language

She tells us why we do this job.

The magic brush: format painting icon

It’s been really busy last several months working on various projects and I just realized that my very last posting was in August. My life has changed a lot since last August. More precisely saying, 31^st of August is a big day to me. I became a father.


By the way, my last posting was about editing format paintings on itd files using TRADOS TagEditor and I just realized there is an easier way to edit format paintings. Take a look at this brush icon on SDL Edit.

This is a magic brush. If you want to edit format paintings on target segments, let’s do this.

First click this brush icon and select the format painting that you want to copy by simply clicking the format painted part.

Select what you want to implement the copied format painting on the target segment.

Now you can see those texts have the same format painting with the source. Just do this until format paintings are same on both the source and target segments.

After editing format paintings on the file by this way, however, you may see the message that there are one or more format painting errors. No worries. This can be fixed on the DTP stage.