Localization of Game

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

How much important do you think is localization of game in some popular non English languages? Would it give the positive impression on the portal guys specially European if you make your game available in there languages? In our company there are many people of different languages so we can easily offer German, Dutch, French and Hindi support. Which languages should be considered important. French and German I know are very important, other than that... what about Finnish, Russian and Italian? Really, if there are too many languages to choose from it just make whole game look messy and difficult to reasonably integrate and resulting in larger game files.

So between Finnish, Italian and Russian what should be best 6th language to support?

[Gio]

Why not Spanish? A lot of people speak Spanish.

 

Most games that offer localization do  English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. It probably depends on the kind of game too, but I believe those are the most common options.

[xerver]

The languages that are "important" depend solely on your audience. If you are publishing to English game sites, where the non-English traffic is negligible, don't waste your time localizing in other languages because it won't be used.

 

The only time you should spend the time localizing, is if there is a need for it to be localized (if you have an audience in those areas). If your main audience speaks Hindi, and the English-speaking traffic is negligible don't bother writing it in English.

 

There is no "most important languages," it just depends on your use cases.

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

The languages that are "important" depend solely on your audience. If you are publishing to English game sites, where the non-English traffic is negligible, don't waste your time localizing in other languages because it won't be used.

 

The only time you should spend the time localizing, is if there is a need for it to be localized (if you have an audience in those areas). If your main audience speaks Hindi, and the English-speaking traffic is negligible don't bother writing it in English.

 

There is no "most important languages," it just depends on your use cases.

Yeah, I thought of this... There is no main traffic... And India is multi lingual so almost all who would ever play game would know working english. Just first and only game to make Hindi available lol. Sanskrit would have been better option as good media attention can be gathered by it. In asia rule of thumb is most people who would use the game would know english and most of them don't expect that they would find it in there language. By my personal opinion Europeans like when something is available without compromise in equality in there language too. I followed Admeen map, the good traffic came from French-Dutch-German region of Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.

[sanojian]

For western games, the most commonly targeted languages after English are referred to as FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish).  They are considered the most worthwhile to target.

 

Here is a blog entry discussing languages to target your game for and reasons for translating:  http://localizedirect.com/blog/which-languages/

 

Its focused on mobile game development but can be applied to any platform.

 

*disclosure* - this is my day job

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

For western games, the most commonly targeted languages after English are referred to as FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish).  They are considered the most worthwhile to target.

 

Here is a blog entry discussing languages to target your game for and reasons for translating:  http://localizedirect.com/blog/which-languages/

 

Its focused on mobile game development but can be applied to any platform.

 

*disclosure* - this is my day job

Very interesting information... Of this FIGS, I can cover FIG. Spanish translators are very costly (by my limited exprience)...

[remvst]

Just wondering, how much would you pay for a translation?

 

I always make a french version, but that's all, I've never asked anybody to make one for me.

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

Just wondering, how much would you pay for a translation?

 

I always make a french version, but that's all, I've never asked anybody to make one for me.

I get it cheap from students nothing to do with programming/game development. They need and ask less because don't have much financial responsiblities first of all. Some agree at $10, some at $20, some are more intellegent want $30 lol.

 

EDIT:

I think I woudln't localize in anything if company want.

[remvst]

I get it cheap from students nothing to do with programming/game development. They need and ask less because don't have much financial responsiblities first of all. Some agree at $10, some at $20, some are more intellegent want $30 lol.

Wow $10 is quite an investment. I guess I'm not ready to unlock such a high amount of money

 

Any place where I could find them in the future? (I'd be looking for spanish/german translations)

[@99golems]

I asked twitter and got a couple people respond with spanish and french offers. No italian yet, and i could probably wing it with german.

 

but so far I haven't had to localize.

[Rudrabhoj Bhati]

Wow $10 is quite an investment. I guess I'm not ready to unlock such a high amount of money

 

Any place where I could find them in the future? (I'd be looking for spanish/german translations)

The usual money for a decent HTML5 game is $400-800 so IF localization makes better impression on the portal and they give you $480 instead of $400 then yes, it is profitable. But I can be wrong as most people on interent now a days are knowing working english. They might not be fluent but even worse can at least read Latin alphabet used by English and can make out something of story. And can understand common words like attack, quit, new game, etc. That's why my game Ancient Savior is first and last multi lingual game. In future I would only do it when asked.

 

I asked twitter and got a couple people respond with spanish and french offers. No italian yet, and i could probably wing it with german.

 

but so far I haven't had to localize.

If you really need Italian translation I say try going to some Italian language forums or search for guys at Italian wikipedia. I guess you would give non exclusive licenses and your game would be free to pay, you might be able to convience some wikipedian (already speding his free time in basically writing in Italian at wikipedia). One of good way to get free/cheap translation is find who is editing Italian page of Italy. See debates at talk pages. Google translate is your tool to understand the discussion. Find patriotic people. See edit history and discussion of Roman Empire page (In Italian). You have better chances to get a patriotic guy to translate in free/cheap because of his love for his language. Same can be true for any other language like Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

 

Normally when asked to localize, I simply provide the English phrases to the publisher, and they provide the native language translations. There's been no need to seek a third party for this...

I would do this from next time. lol translations and merging them into game is difficult. Like in my game palyer get the messages in form of cave incriptions. So merging languages is difficult.

[remvst]

The usual money for a decent HTML5 game is $400-800 so IF localization makes better impression on the portal and they give you $480 instead of $400 then yes, it is profitable. But I can be wrong as most people on interent now a days are knowing working english. They might not be fluent but even worse can at least read Latin alphabet used by English and can make out something of story. And can understand common words like attack, quit, new game, etc. That's why my game Ancient Savior is first and last multi lingual game. In future I would only do it when asked.

I was joking... a bad joke maybe, but still a joke

 

About you guys not wanting to translate anything unless explicitly asked, maybe that's OK if you only want to distribute them via sponsors, but since I also distribute my games on my own website, I think that translating is worth it (especially since it takes me a few minutes to integrate a new language).

 

Maybe in the US everyone thinks that English is the only important language, but that's not the case in Europe.

[sanojian]

Just wondering, how much would you pay for a translation?

 

I always make a french version, but that's all, I've never asked anybody to make one for me.

 

I work for a professional video game translation service and our rate is  €0.11 per word for English to FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish).  Other language rates vary.

 

This includes tools for managing your game strings with a revisioning system.  www.localizedirect.com

 

Sorry it this sounds spammy, just answering the question asked :-)

[Evan Burchard]

Another possibility is using less/no words.  It doesn't avoid having to translate the metadata for discovery, but for a lot of games, text is a crutch that isn't really needed to the extent that it is used.  Like saying "Life" next to a health bar (first 4(?) zelda games), or having text like "Game Start" when there's established icons that indicate these types of things (play button).  IIRC, Castle Crashers tended to use little emotion bubbles and a trite/characterized/familiar story that obviated the need for dialogue.  Character motivation can be described as flashbacks.  How-tos can get animations or just leave people to figure it out within reasonable constraints (keyboard vs. controller does make this slightly more difficult).

 

I'm into words, but besides language barriers, some people can't read (too young, poor eyesight, poor reading skills) and some don't want to read.  As an example of text gone wild, tell me that the first minute and a half of this video isn't painful: