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The Trials And Tribulations Of Video Game Localization

How does a video game from another region make it into your hands, and how do companies ensure you’re getting an experience that lives up to the original? As the gaming industry becomes more globalized, video game localization is an increasingly pertinent topic. But few people actually understand what goes into the process. Preparing to release a game in a new country or region comes with many challenges that go well beyond simple translation.Get more news about Video Game Localization Companies,you can vist our website!

When a game is localized well, it’s free of typos and grammatical errors, the dialogue is natural, and the instructions make sense. But even this is skimming the surface of the localization team’s role in the process. As games become more complex and text-heavy, not only do the challenges continue to grow, but the quality bar – and our expectations – constantly rise. There’s now a larger focus on the ways games are adapted from their origin for our consumption. And rightfully so, as poor localization can tarnish our experience with a game. Or it can live on in jokes and memes, like Zero Wing’s “All your base are belong to us!” or Final Fantasy IV’s “You spoony bard!”

These days, we don’t see as many hilarious blunders, despite receiving games that are much more complex and challenging to bring to a Western audience, such as the Yakuza series, where Japanese culture is integral to its identity. We chatted with nine different people in localization, who have worked on series such as Ace Attorney, Nier, and SMT, to discover more about the process and its hardships, uncovering everything from why direct translations fail to adapting language-specific puzzles.

Lost in Translation
Every language has its own complexities, rules, and flavors. What’s acceptable and understandable in communication differs depending on the region. For instance, the Japanese language uses a lot of hierarchical signifiers to show respect, but this sounds awkward when translated into English. When accepting a task from a superior, English speakers don’t say things like, “I humbly accept.”

Japanese also doesn’t require the same kind of explicit context that English does; sentences often don’t have a subject, object, or other information necessary in English. “It’s because Japanese is a high context culture, whereas English is a low context culture,” explains Sega Lost Judgment producer Scott Strichart. “Japanese expects you to understand the implication of a sentence. There’s a lot of other stuff under the hood in Japanese culture; you just naturally can appreciate when someone says something. They don’t speak directly about people often. There’s no subject, so to speak.”

And then there’s the issue of how different cultures view certain terms. “A word’s dictionary definition and its actual usage and the image it conjures up for a native speaker can be very different at times,” says Capcom localization director Janet Hsu. “An example is the English word ‘animation’ being shortened to anime in Japanese, and then getting re-imported into English as ‘anime.’ The Japanese word [means] ‘any kind of animation,’ including cartoons, but in English, the word “anime” is strictly reserved for Japanese animated works. Now, imagine trying to directly translate whole concepts and trains of logic from one language into another, and you can see how things can quickly go off the rails.”

It’s important to look at how languages differ because little things have huge consequences in the process. The hottest debates surrounding localization today center on translation and how faithful it is to the source. Fans worry about not getting an authentic experience or localization teams taking too many liberties. This is where most misconceptions originate, and localizers have heard it all, from people assuming Google Translate can do the job to cries of censorship over alterations made for Western sensibilities. However, the biggest request from gamers is often for a “direct translation.”