English to French IT Translator Blog

Video games are not exactly one of the best-paying fields of the translation industry. Many developers like to work with a single vendor for their multilingual localization needs, which means much of the work gets done through agencies, competing hard on prices. Another major factor is the perception that video game localization is easy as long as you love games and can speak two languages. It actually is a double problem, because 1. Clients use this as an argument to negotiate prices (“Hey, it’s easy and it’s a GAME, it won’t even feel like work!”) and 2. Lots of game enthusiasts try to jump on-board with no knowledge of translation and its industry, thus increasing competition and driving rates down.

Thinking of this, two questions came to my mind:

– Is game localization really that easy compared to other specializations?

– To what extent is the (perceived) difficulty of a translation project relevant when it comes to pricing?

Is Game Localization Easy?

First of all, I would like to clarify one thing: I don’t think there’s such a thing as an easy translation. My philosophy is that, if a translation projects feels easy, you’re probably not aiming high enough. Now, if your goal is to produce a translation that will generally be considered “good enough”, games are probably not the hardest material to translate.

Most video games are aimed at a general audience. Young/casual gamers should be able to take their controller and enjoy playing without the need to open a dictionary every five minutes. Even for specialized games like, say, racing simulations, while you do see technical jargon some people may not be familiar with, you never really reach the degree of complexity you get in technical documentation or patents.

In that respect, game localization can be seen as a relatively easy field to enter. You don’t need 12 years of medical studies to understand what a game is about. You don’t need to be an aerospace engineer to get what’s going on.

Variables, lack of context and character limits? You learn how to deal with them pretty quickly. All it takes is time… quite a bit of it, actually. Time, as in “Time is money”. That’s exactly where the problem stands.

Productivity and Rates

When your freelance business takes off and your schedule starts filling up, it doesn’t take long until you realize that rates alone don’t mean much. What really matters is how much you earn per time unit (hour, day or whatever unit you like). This is one aspect of game localization people often fail to see: games may not be the hardest type of text to translate, but boy, does the process take time!

All games have their own universes, atmospheres and codes. As a translator, you can’t just jump between them like you would do for two printers from different manufacturers, for example. You need to adapt to the characteristics of each game, and that’s time you can’t really shorten if you care about quality.

Then, different things will get on your way as you go on with your translation. Lack of context is one terribly common issue with game localization. You will often need to send long lists of queries to your client to figure out what such or such item is, who someone is talking about in a sentence, whether a character is a male of female, etc. Preparing these queries is very time consuming, and you may only receive the answers far down the road, if ever.

Other things, like character limitations, can take an awful lot of your time, especially if you can’t find a proper solution and need to send yet another client query.

In other specializations, if you can’t find the translation for a technical word, you do your own research and memorize the term once and for all. Since you don’t need to look up that word again, you gain productivity with time. On the other hand, for video games, you need to repeat the familiarization/querying process every time around, which means your margin for productivity improvement is rather limited.

Game Translators: Charge More!

Speaking from personal experience, I can say my productivity is way better than it was when I started my life as a translator. However, games have always been trailing behind on that improvement curve. I translate games faster today because I got familiar with the whole process, but this improvement is not anywhere near as significant as it has been for some other of my specializations, such as user manuals for computer hardware (printers, projectors, etc.). It’s not a problem that appears very clearly when you start out and everything is new to you, but with time it becomes obvious that game localization just takes more time than “technical fields” at a comparable level of experience.

In the end, game translators lose twice: once when they negotiate rates, because clients think games are easy to translate, and once because experience doesn’t help quite as much as in other fields. Remember: hourly rate = rate * hourly productivity. So if you accept half the per-word rate of, say, a legal translator and translate half as fast, you are making 4 times less money per hour.

A good general rule, not only for games but for translation in general, is to set per-word prices that will allow you to reach the hourly rate of your choice. The rest shouldn’t be relevant. Remember that the next time you quote for a project!

Game localization is one of these disciplines that generally get noticed by media and gamers only when things go wrong. A quick online search will return tons of examples of bad game translations, sometimes hilarious. However, you will have trouble if you’re trying to find examples of outstanding works.

Game translators are the unsung heroes of localization, and it is in the best interest of the industry to work toward solutions that will reward the best of us.

A few existing initiatives

Although we love to complain about the lack of publicity we get when we do a great job, there are actually a few awards for outstanding localization works. The Atrae’s (Spanish Association for Audiovisual Translation and Adaptation) awards for the teams in charge of translating Far Cry 4 and Inazuma Eleven Go into Spanish are good examples.

How could we organize awards and who should be allowed to vote?

The LocJAM organizers will tell you better than anybody else, it takes an incredible amount of time and efforts to organize a contest covering several languages.

It would probably be too ambitions to start awarding translations for more than a few languages to begin with. Instead, the ideal solution is to concentrate efforts on a few languages to gather a strong jury and ensure a smooth and reactive organization.

EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) and Japanese are the most common target languages for game localization and could be a good base. Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Arabic and others could be considered later down the road. In general, the LocJAM model could be a good fit for the development of such awards.

The question of jurors is also important. Opening the awards to just anybody would turn the thing into a popularity contest, which is obviously not the goal here.

Media specialized in video games (magazines, websites, etc.) are of course a good place to start with. Professionals who play all sorts of games all year long and with proper writing skills. Asking more general media that offer a game column could be a great way to have more votes and to put the awards in front of more eyes – which is the goal in the first place. And let’s not forget about relevant associations, such as the Atrae mentioned above.

As for the voting itself, some questions will need to be discussed with all parties. Can any game be nominated? Could several games be nominated? A few headaches ahead!

The limits of game localization awards

Before going too far into things, let’s try to keep in mind some critics such an initiative may face:

-The influence of game quality: To be absolutely honest, when I try to think of some games I thought were extremely well localized, only major titles come up. There are probably lots of mediocre games that were translated exceptionally well, but we naturally tend to remember the games we enjoyed. Putting these considerations aside would be one of the biggest challenges for the jurors.

-The influence of source text quality: The source material plays a vital role. Sure, the greatest translators can make a target text even better than the source. But if the original game is full of boring descriptions, meaningless dialogs and all-so-common characters, the translator’s margin of improvement will be limited.

Unfortunately, there is not much we can do here. Contenders would most likely be games well written in the first place. All we can do is use the fact as an opportunity to celebrate both exceptional localization teams and game writers. The skeptics will point out that having your name in the credits would be a good first step. I remember of a game I proofread this year, the credits had an impressive 5,000+ name list, including the pets of the developers (not even kidding), but absolutely no mention was made of the localization team.

For translators, game localization comes in all flavors. All developers seem to have their own way to present strings they need us to translate. While Excel files are common, their organization can greatly vary from a client to another. Some will use different numbers of columns displayed in a different order, others will enable all sorts of macros or use some color coding. Sometimes everything is gathered in a random order in a unique file and single tab, sometimes you end up with hundreds of small files with dozens of tabs.

Translators will either have to adapt and work in such files, or convert the strings into a format they can use in their everyday translation tool. Either way, these extra steps are a huge source of human errors, which can in turn cause major problems and much of stress when deadlines are looming.

Back to the other side of the process, implementing the strings back into the game can also require a number of steps, depending on how well the developer prepared for implementation. Again, these extra actions can take a lot of time from people who never have enough of it.

How can we solve or at least alleviate these problems? The best way to handle the situation would be to define a standard for game localization strings. Here are some advantages of such a solution, for both developers and translators.

Standard format = Everybody works towards the same goals

The main source of the problems mentioned above is that you will hardly find two developers handling localization the same way. Some existing methods are reasonably good, but none of them is fully optimized or offered with the tools needed to cover the whole process.

A common format means everybody can share their best practices and scripts for handling localization files properly. It would offer professionals of the industry a great chance to work together towards simplification of the localization process. We could quickly see automated tools for analysis, conversion, quality checks, etc. of localization files appear for the benefit of all.

The Developers’ point of view

Consistency and predictability: With a standard format, no need to think about how you will handle strings. Everything is documented and the process is the same for every project. Once again, if everybody uses the same format, chances that automated tools will be available to generate source files from the game’s code without any extra effort. No need to work on ad-hoc solutions and tweak them for every new project.

Seamless implementation: With a well-defined standard and the proper tools, implementation doesn’t have to be more complex than a copy/paste of the files you get from your translators.

Traceability: It’s great to highlight Excel cells in yellow, orange or pink when you make changes to your strings or add some, but it’s tedious and leaves too much room to human errors. With a proper standard and related tools, it becomes much easier to see what has changed from a file to another and obtain meaningful analysis data.

This is also true for translators who need to perform word counts to figure how much they have to charge. Anybody will tell you that it’s not particularly fun to manually look for highlighted strings in a huge Excel file and copy/paste them somewhere else to do a word count…

Where Translators benefit from a standard format

Flexibility: Excel files have their advantages and are always a useful reference when you need extra information about a string. However, many translators will prefer working with their own tools. The problem is that, to make it possible at all, we need to prepare the files to be able to open them with our software of choice. It can take quite some time (especially when it comes to updates) and be a source of mistakes.

With a standard format, however, it is possible to set up translation tools in the way they can open these files without any further modification. This one-time configuration can save hours of work down the road if developers stick to that format.

And of course you can use conversion tools if you want to, say, have a file in the original format for translation and one that Excel can open to display meta data (comments, specific instructions, etc.) in a more visual way.

Reduction of human errors: Translators hate playing with files and formats. I witnessed it first hand in one of my previous lives, and it wasn’t a beautiful sight. The more steps a translator has to follow to prepare a source file or generate a target file, the more likely you are to end up with something unusable. If translators can directly open and save files in the proper format, you can (almost?) say goodbye to missing strings, broken tags and the like.

Conclusion: What are we waiting for?

On paper, a common standard could only offer advantages to everybody involved, and one may wonder what everybody is waiting for.

The video game industry is large and growing, with actors ranging from one-man studios to large corporations. Gathering everybody around the same table to discuss an issue still overlooked by many is a bit of a utopia.

Ideally, we would need a core of experts to work on the subject together with interested parties, create a format that works for all, produce the tools to make its implementation easy, and finally actively promote the package among developers of all over the world, regardless of their size, through every possible channel.

Industry experts, it’s time to make it happen!