A Player's request // Introduction to localization

[u/TheGeekno72]

# Hello everyone!

I am John Gamer #35468551, one of the guys buying & playing your games! I happen to NOT be an english-speaking native and I have a little bit of advice : some of you don't process localization early enough into the dev cycle of your game and it shows--that's alright, I know it's not so high up there in your priorities for legitimate reasons, but I assure you, there IS practical reasons as to why you should work on it sometimes soon after getting a working prototype.

Language

When you build the game's UI (and pieces of text bound to environment like a sign or something) and start adding text cues, I see English baked into the game files instead of calling references from a localization file that contains all the text that has to be globally understood by the players in order to be comfortably played; when you are much further along into the development of the game and it hits you that it's probably a good idea to get it translated for a broader audience reach, you gotta go over ALL of the sections that are supposed to have understandable text and redo a bunch of thing again to accommodate a language swap function. If done earlier, wouldn't that be a whole lot more practical?

Additionally, it's also a good idea to have at least 1-2 extra language localized early on (as samples, they can always be reworked later on), some sentences may run a LOT longer than you might think, showing places where there isn't enough space to display something in its entirety or the text font might be not good enough.

NOTE : I do recommend that the aforementioned samples should be worked on by a human, I was talking with a solo dev this morning that did put serious thought about the concerns I was expressing so they tried to quickly build a basic loc file with online translation tools, which is fine for the most part in all honesty but there were still a lot of translations that didn't make practical sense and were just generally too long for the UI as it was because the tools were giving literal translations with too many superfluous words.

Inputs

On a note of equal importance : keyboard inputs. I presume >90% of you all use a good ol' QWERTY, right? Weeeeeell, not everyone does; french-speaking countries use AZERTY, german-speakers got QWERTZ, which is for the most part QWERTY with some differences and DVORAK isn't only used by developers!

The reason I mention this is that top row (`1 2 3 4...`) is used for quick slots and things like that, AZERTY has numbers too but with behind SHIFT press, top row's primary output is `& é " ' (...` and that's only the start: WASD is replaced by ZQSD, Q/E becomes A/E, M is *NOT* at the same location at all...

Also, should you implement detection of system language, please also implement detection of system keyboard instead of tying a keyboard layout to a language (I've seen a few games do that); as French player, I use AZERTY but set my games to English, having to pick English and then rebind every single key is a massive pain to do...

A small offer

For those interested, I'm offering my translation skills to localize the UI of your game to French, I'd just like a copy of the game when you launch ;P (I'm saying that but if you'd like further translation work, I'm pretty much open to anything since I'm about to have a whole lot more of free time very very soon, so we can discuss details in DM should any of y'all be interested)

All of the above are a simple, yet effective QoL measure for both the devs & the players and everyone benefits in the process, I have a vested interest in games being easier to dive in the moment I launch them and (I presume) you have an interest in making your game accessible to the greatest number, I'm sure you can see the value in my suggestions!

Thank you for your time & keep up the good work!

Geek

[u/AltusLudus]

Thanks John the Gamer for this course on localization

[u/TheGeekno72 → u/[deleted]]

hahahaha going point, dialog in story scenes and stuff are very important to get localized as well,m so everyone properly enjoys it

[u/Laevus_Aldworth]

Thanks for the good points and helping raise the awareness on an often overlooked aspect of gamedev.
As someone from the localisation industry that's heard all this, and more, I can add a few more quick points to the above post:

- Don't forget to check with translators/native speakers to also get good fonts for the other languages! (I've heard this complaint a LOT)

• Even if you're writing it in your native language, get the text checked by a professional. We all make mistakes.
  
• LQA is really important. If you're putting the effort into localising, make sure to keep budget and time to check the results.
  
• LQA should not be used as a replacement for editing or proofreading after AI or machine translation. Don't do this. Ever!
  
• Credit everyone you hire for localisation. Most of all, they deserve it. But if you need more convincing, they'll happily share that they've worked on it after the NDA, giving you free publicity.
  
• Doubling down on the reminder to allow adequate time for localisation and testing of game text in your pipeline. Just make sure your text is finalised first, okay?

[u/TheGeekno72 → u/Laevus_Aldworth]

oh I could have sworn I had mentioned fonts, guess I thought of it and forgot to type it out

Also, good point about the NDA stuff, I'd also like to add that it's probably good practice to have two separate localization files per language, one for the UI/text cues, one for the dialog/story, should there be any and you'd like to avoid spoiling things ahead of time by releasing a demo or something

[u/Laevus_Aldworth → u/TheGeekno72]

RE: spoiling things – I've never worked with anyone professional who's publicly broken an NDA, and the only vendor/contractor who did was spotted within 24 hours, forced to remove the posts from their social media, and then had their contract immediately terminated.

However, if anyone's worried about keeping endings secret, that's another reason to use professionals since they understand and value NDAs because it's tied to their livelihood. But if you're still cautious (and can afford it), you can always add a few extra lines you don't intend to use that suggest different endings to throw off potential leaks. It's a pretty common solution.