Project type: Game translation and localization
Project workload: Over 20K words in four languages
Project language: Chinese simplified to
Chinese traditional TW, English, Korean and Japanese
Project delivery date: 7 days
Original format: Excel
Translation format: Excel
The company is a professional Game developer in China. Established in 2020, their team are young with most colleagues in their 20 to 30 years, but they have rich experience in game development with comprehensive qualification.
They offer many casual games that are top in ranking lists with over 30 million players. With promising potential1 they got finance funding with over 10 million USD in 2021. Thus, they hope to introduce their games to more players globally. In order to put players in a comfortable zone and offer an enjoyable experience, they want to have their games localized into new markets languages so as to meet in-depth marketing needs.
Challenge
The company has a team with many young game developers. They have a good command of game design language (technical language) but not the languages in the game. In addition, in their online game community, many players are calling for native game language support so that they can know clearly about the game. Thus, in terms of game localization, they know it is not simply machine translation, but they have little idea on how to get them done properly.
Artlangs is an ATA & ISO certified Game Localization company that has successfully collaborated with giant game clients like EA, Tencent, Ubisoft, etc. In 2010, our team started to establish professional game localization team covering different language requests. Thus, we especially stand out for game translation and localization solution.
Difficulties of the Project
1 As word and character are with different spacing and format, for UI text, letter limit is requested but for some text, translation in hard to meet.
2 Relative rush time with branch delivery.
3 The game was still on development so some text was not totally polished, and source files changed a lot in the translation process.
4 It was the first time client started game localization, so they did not have any reference file for translators.
Solutions
1 Before official work, we provided sample test to suitable resources, and after confirmation from customer, we finally assigned the job to special project manager and translators with rich game localization and knowledge of both source and target language
experience.
2 Our team had to establish terminology list and translation memory for consistent translation based on professional translation experience.
3 For some UI text, our linguists kept thinking the best way to meet letter limit request. With communications from both parties and effective opinions from our linguists, we reached a consensus finally.
4 For uncertain source contents, our linguists gave professional suggestions to clients and waited until they finished the text revise to save cost in the whole process.
5 Team cooperation is of importance. We established an online group talk, included all related game colleagues from both teams.
Every problem was soon solved with instant online messaging.
Results
The whole process of this project went smoothly. After detail-oriented QA by our PM, the translation files were delivered back to the client on time. Our client was very satisfied with the job quality and our
considerate service. The translation has been updated on the game, We also helped LQA on final game part. Not long later, we learned from the client that in their community, players shared the good news of
finding our translation useful and effective in understanding the whole game.
Client even replied that for future games with any language translation and localization request, we will be their first choice. That is what we strive for, that is, long-term cooperation!
