It is important to choose the region and localize the game by native speakers. When translating, specialists take into account both the linguistic subtleties and the cultural characteristics of different countries - they know how much nuance matters.
Who is involved in the process of localizing games?
Sometimes games are translated by enthusiasts who work completely free of charge for their audience. There are cases when employees working in the studio as translators localize the specific games. Usually, the game developer builds a team outsourcing professional translation services online, including native speakers - people who know the specific country in detail - its culture, religion, and lifestyle conditions.5 Tips for Localizing Your Game in 2021
1. Analyze your target audience and markets you want to reachThe choice of languages depends on the game and its target markets. However, these five languages are considered to be the most popular in terms of market size, Internet users, online sales in general, and Google Play revenue in particular in the region: Chinese, English, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian. All the world’s best games have a wide range of languages to cover the audience as widely as possible.
2. Start with building a glossary
A glossary is a special dictionary with interpretation, translation, and examples of the use of terms found in the text. Such a dictionary can be imported into an automated translation program to speed up your work and ensure that specialized terms are translated consistently throughout the text or across all translation files.
The availability of the glossary allows you to connect several translators to the project and change them during the execution of the order.
3. Get ready to spend some money
Translation cost consists of the amount of text for localization (the number of characters with spaces) and the number of hours spent testing localization. It is strongly recommended to do testing as this will allow you to achieve the highest quality localization.
Translations into different languages differ in cost. This is due to the different living standards in countries where native translators live.
4. Don’t skip testing
Testing is an obligatory step that allows you to identify errors and sometimes improve the translation. If you learn more about game localization, you will see that it is one of the main things experts recommend. Developers select the most responsible and competent players who want to play their favorite game in their native language, give them a beta version of the translation with a request to reproduce as many game situations as possible. A fresh look from the outside is always good.
5. Continuous localization
Using online platforms, it is possible to structure the process of localizing a game in such a way that at the time of release the application is always fully translated: constantly, at any time. The principle is pretty simple. The developer adds a new line to the game resources.
The updated resource file is sent to the localization platform automatically and the translator will immediately see the new text, translating it straight away.
Before the next build is launched, updated translations are also taken from the platform automatically. Thus, by the time of each build of the game, all localizations are 100% ready and don’t delay updates.
Localization is an essential step if the game developer wants to reach a wider audience. If done properly, it can not only increase your sales but also help to get world recognition.
BIO: Michael Carr
Michael is an experienced author who is passionate about writing. His interests include business, internationalization and globalization processes, and management theories. Michael
dives into a topic he does research on and produces quality conclusions. In his free time, he is a huge computer game fan and music lover.
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