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Square Enix: Problems with Localisation
| By Blitzballer 545 days ago Category: Square Enix News Tagged with : gdc : Localisation |
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Gamasutra have a decent article with Richard Mark Honeywood, a translator, localization director, and programmer on many Square-Enix titles. He was talking at the GDC with a fellow translator Colin Williamson about problems, difficulties and tricks that arise with localising a Japanaese product to other territories. Ive picked out a choice few quotes etc but read more by clicking the source link: Square-Enix games “are so damn complex” and there is never enough time. As Honeywood put it, everyone on the localization staff are “either artists or perfectionists,” something that could be improved upon. There is also never enough money. Some of the more interesting ways for the team to save money is “instead of flying everyone to Tokyo, we’ll go to places like Austria,” due to the cheaper airfare and accommodations. Additionally, members of the localization team will provide voices for some of the minor roles. Williamson then demonstrated his rather impressive Slime voice. There is also never enough space on Square-Enix games. The eternal problem of Kanji to English did not go away with the 16 bit era. An example of a more inventive solution was shown with Final Fantasy VIII, in which a menu of statistics using Chinese characters in the Japanese version was replaced in the localized version with icons instead of words. With Final Fantasy XI, Square-Enix’s MMORPG, keeping the English translation up to date with the scripts being produced by Japanese development team was described by Honeywood as “a war of attrition”. “We lack direct Japanese to FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish) translators, so we have to resort to Japanese to English, then English to FIGS.” The main challenge in localizing these games was, said Honeywood, was, “How am I expected to translate all this text into English when they don’t have basic grammar!” or what can be seen as the “You got a 5 sword(s)” translation problem. Honeywood said that “for small games you can branch the source code,” but European languages can have up to 16 grammatical variations making it impossible to hard code. The solution for them was a custom built macro system that handles articles, singular/plurals and masculine/feminine/neutral text branching. In addition, Square-Enix now work with the development teams to implement singular/plural item distinction in the design phase. Source: Gamasutra Add to Digg |
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Comments
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By: Melody Of Zack On: 12:01 Mar 13th, 2007 Offline |
It has to be one hell of a nightmare for those translator dudes | ||
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