When it comes to localizing “traditional” games – where the content is finalized and requires no further updates (or minor updates at large intervals) – there is a clear process that corresponds to the procedure outlined on our website. In most cases, this applies to offline single-player games.
It’s a different story when it comes to various mobile projects, MMO, MOBA and other multiplayer games. These kinds of games are constantly updated, with developers adding content (promotions, updates, holiday-related challenges, new characters, chapters, locations, etc.) to be localized into the languages they need. With some projects, such updates occur several times a week.
Our goal is to keep pace with developers and deliver high-quality localized content whenever it’s required. While there are generally no issues with the speed of localization (updates contain small sections of text, not several thousand words), ensuring high quality requires devoting attention to the particular features of continuous localization.
Both localization specialists and developers/publishers can avoid errors and provide high quality and consistency of the text by following several simple rules:
- Assign special localization teams to long-running projects. If one of your teams translated and proofread the main in-game texts, the same team should work on the Christmas update for the game a year later. They know the setting, context, specifics and mechanics. They know how locations and characters look. And, most importantly, they know how these elements have been translated before.
- Maintain and constantly update glossaries and translation memories. There are various reasons why it may not be possible to follow the previous rule – translators can get sick, retire or be unavailable in the moment. In this case, glossaries and translation memories help to integrate other people into the project without harming quality or speed.
Glossaries are lists of in-game terms (names of characters, locations, objects, etc.) and their recommended translations. For example, a translator working with a glossary will know not to turn “Blackwind Castle” into “Black Wind Castle” or “The Castle of Black Winds”.
A translation memory is a database containing a set of previously translated text segments. Updates often contain previously used pieces of text, albeit slightly altered. Even if another person translates the update, he/she can review suggested translations from the translation memory.
Both translation memories and glossaries can be easily maintained with specialized CAT tools. The most popular ones are Trados, Memsource, MemoQ, Deja Vu, etc.
Updated translation memories and glossaries should always be available to both localization specialists and developers/publishers.
- Spot testing. To ensure the highest localization quality, do not forget about linguistic testing. But what if you need to check only a small amount of text from the latest update? Obviously, re-testing the full game again is too expensive and takes too long. The best solution is spot testing for updates, where a translator can use in-game cheats to quickly find the required game fragment. Where this is not possible, any methods to cut out the “unnecessary” part of the content will suffice: gameplay videos, screenshots (in minor updates), game builds that start right in the new location.
Remember that nothing guarantees the complete absence of localization mistakes. But following these three simple rules can significantly reduce the risk.