With games crossing global boundaries every day, someone’s gotta handle the linguistic logistics—and one such person has shared her experiences and challenges. On the site Game Developer, which allows devs to create their own blogs, Sarah Müller, Head of Localization at Gameforge, blogged about how the localization process usually goes.
Gameforge is in a specifically special position to talk about these sorts of games, given it focuses on Asian games such as Runes of Magic and NosTale. It’s especially interesting since there’s a massive leap in translating between “character”-based and tonal languages such as (and especially) Chinese and phonetic ones like English and German.
For instance, Müller points out that Chinese has seven different words for “luck,” as opposed to English which requires a full re-building of context to convey these sorts of words. It also becomes an issue when implementing voice-overs, as what can be conveyed briefly in one language can become a far larger sentence in another, which is problematic for animation purposes.
Apparently it takes an army, especially for larger games. One of Gameforge’s recent projects required a year and a half of its full-time in-house team’s dedication, plus an “expanded pool of freelance editors and Chinese translators” during the pandemic. They took quite a few lessons from it, including understanding and adapting to scope, but Müller delightfully called it a “challenge.”
And yes, they do also use CSVs, the constant of business greatness. Probably.
You can read about the full process and it’s challenges on Müller’s Game Developer blog.
