Game Localization: Basic Rules on How to Prepare Your Game
What is Game Localization?
Game Localization is the process of modifying a game so that the players in the target markets will feel like the game was made for their residing country. Games reflecting native languages and cultures are in high demand in the video game industry. Therefore, you must localize, not only translate, games by paying attention to cultural context.
The video game industry is rapidly growing because of the development of the internet and the increasing prevalence of smartphones. Accordingly, High-quality video game localization will lead to a successful global launch and high return.
As stated above, professional video game localization, not just text translation, will gain competitive advantages and success in the target markets by drawing attention and immersion from the players.
Top-quality video game localization checklist
Character & Universe
There are many different characters and universes according to the genre such as simulation, adventure, role-playing, or open-world video games. Thus, linguists must check not only character description, but also the personality, background, and history of each character before they start localizing the game. Understanding the characters and the universes will help tone matching by the background story and each character.
Sequence segments & tag arrangement
When it comes to a script file, the segments should be sorted according to the scenarios or the quests. Sorting by alphabetical order makes linguists struggle when they try to understand the context, and it risks the quality of the game localization.
Translatable in-game text file
Hard-coding is not an effective way in game localization. When codes are mixed with in-game text, it will be hard to extract the text and translate it. Moreover, the code might change during the process of separating it from the text.
Sufficient time & Communication
In general, game localization is often followed by the time when the game has been developed. In this case, the schedule is likely to be tight for the release date. And the linguists might end up with a poor quality of the localization since they worked to a very tight deadline. If you allocate sufficient time to game localization at the beginning of the game development, you will be offered top-quality deliverables.
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