What are the steps of professional game localization?

Once your video game is out, you think about how to make it appeal to gamers across the globe. Localization can help you do just that. In this article, we will describe ten essential steps for game localization. Are you ready?

1. Choose your languages

Before you even think about going local, you need to do the following:

  • Stalk your competitors! Take a look at other game developers’ localizations. As a rule, if they’ve succeeded in a particular market, you will too.
  • Consider the genre. Dig deeper into those localizations. For example, if you develop indie games, taking a sneak peek at a retro-style game localization may help you pinpoint your future locales.
  • Think local. Study the most frequent game localization languages and go for the kill.

2. Upgrade your interface for multiple languages

No five fingers are the same. Guess what? Languages are no exception. So, when you build your interface elements, it’s advisable to allow 30% or more extra space for several languages. This works well with short strings like menu items, UI, etc.

But if you have a long list of target countries, adjust your interface design for the “worst-language” case scenario. How about German? (no offence intended, it’s just that German is known to use more space than English).

Byte-wise, Latin characters equal 1 byte each, but Arabic or Cyrillic characters use 2 bytes per character. So, in terms of data storage, every byte counts.

3. Never build text strings into code

Embedding text into code is a nightmare for any localization professional. Adapting game content for localization will lead to lots of heavily coded strings being lost. A vital tip to save yourself the headache and your content is to refrain from building text out of shorter or even single-word pieces. Coding is at the heart of localization or l10n for short.

4. Numbers, numbers, numbers

Time, dates, units of measurement and any numerical information that your game contains must also be localized. So don’t hard-code it.

For example, a timer or a clock ticking somewhere in your game must be localized differently for Western and Asian countries since their perceptions of time differ. For Westerners, time is an ongoing stretching timeline. In contrast, Asians have a circular representation of time.

5. Placeholders and formatters are the best guides

Using placeholders and formatters are the way to go when hard-coding. Instead of using actual text strings, you could use something like this:

“Mummy ate %num% apples.”

Adding placeholder descriptions as above “num” (which could only indicate that a number must be inserted in that place) can help you distinguish between the various pieces of content.

6. Don’t add text to images

Don’t forget all your images, colours, and characters must be adapted to your locale. If you add text to your images, to localize them, you will need to redesign the whole imagery to fit the language script. But if you want to hit your new market fast, it’s best to avoid any extra steps like this.

7. Use Unicode

We all know how difficult it is to accommodate spécîål characters. That’s exactly what Unicode was created for. To avoid the gory ���, use Unicode, and your special characters will be readable. UTF-8 is also a space-efficient option.

The same applies to fonts. Avoid fancy fonts if you don’t want your localized game content to look like □□□.

8. Test

Once you’ve joined all the technical dots of the process, you need to do one more thing – test! There are several pseudo-localization tools you can use to get an idea of what your local interface would look like.

9. Build a glossary

Create a glossary with all the in-game terms and concepts to be preserved consistently throughout the game. You can include character names, artifacts, endearing names, statuses, etc.

10. Give context

Be prepared to brief your localization team about the context. Keep the communication channel between developers, scriptwriters, translators, and localization project managers always open. When everyone is on the same page, nothing can go wrong. We hope this helps.

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