6 Tips To Achieve High-Quality Game Translation Projects
Converting a game’s text and dialogue from the original language to a new one requires a deeper linguistic journey. Then to provide gamers with a natural and gratifying experience, a game translation business must go above and beyond. Here are some crucial considerations when putting together a high-quality gaming translation campaign.
#1. Provide The Optimal Environment For Game Translation
Professional translators should be able to convert gaming-industry-specific vocabulary, arrange and translate dialogues between several speakers, recognize and understand a variety of accents, overcome translation obstacles caused by poor audio, and handle a variety of other conversion challenges.
Allowing translators to focus solely on precisely sorting and processing these elements delivers the best possible results. Below is several approaches game creators can employ to assist translators in achieving this degree of nuance in their work, resulting in a more enriching experience for players and increased engagement.
Employ Translators Who Play Video Games
There’s no substitute for native language speakers who are also familiar with the game genre you’re working on. Translators that enjoy playing video games will have an easier time translating genre-specific lingo and other terminologies that are often used in gaming culture. Gamers have extremely high expectations for gaming content and game-related stuff. As a result, an internationally marketed game must be translated to the same high standard for each audience and market.
Allow Enough Time And Resources For Translators
Assist translators in performing their jobs as efficiently as possible by providing them with the greatest translation tools available. A Translation Memory (TM) database, for example, can save time, increase quality, and reduce costs. TM gives essential real-time suggestions for terms that have already been translated, ensuring that translators are not compelled to duplicate work. Supplementary Machine Translation (MT) can give referencing, which can save time for human translators. Developers can also bring translators straight onto their digital platform for translation work, enhancing collaboration and quality.
Provide Translators With Contextual Information
When being translated directly into all target languages, some expressions may not make sense. To provide perfect translations for multiple languages, game makers must provide context for game dialogue and texts to translators. The overarching goal of your translation efforts should be to achieve more than just a basic understanding of the game’s plot. Players should be able to thoroughly immerse themselves in the game, taking in all of its smart intricacies and subtleties.
Provide Game Assets for Game Translation
The game translation is the process of converting one or more of a game’s numerous assets into a version suitable for overseas markets. Some components may be included in the game translation work: Text files, User manuals, In-game and web graphics, Instruction guides, Physical packaging, Digital packaging, etc.
#2. Follow A Consistent Game Translation Process
A professional translation procedure is well-organized and pays close attention to the smallest of details, and in general, it has 4 steps.
Translation
Playing the game, reviewing the glossaries and style guides, knowing the context, and translating audio with text files can be the first part of this process. Editing, proofreading, and quality checking and/or testing the translated text are also included.
Quality Assurance
Close assessments of all text elements are performed as part of the translation quality assurance process. It aims to ensure accurate translation and to fix any problems in details, spelling, grammar, and so on. Audio files are thoroughly checked for faults such as distorted, garbled, or mumbled phrases, as well as volume discrepancies and other audio quality issues.
File Conversions
The translated files are converted to the original game file formats after the quality assurance operations are completed. Text files that have been translated are incorporated into the game coding, and audio files that have been translated are converted to MP4, WMA, or other audio file formats that the game creator prefers.
Follow-Up QA Testing
At this point, the language translation provider or a third-party quality testing service may conduct further quality checks on the game’s coding to ensure that it is perfectly connected with the freshly translated content.
#3. Consider Multiple Text Dimensions In Different Languages
Between the source language and any language into which the content is being translated, there are usually a lot of differences in phrase and sentence length. To say the same thing in one language, it may take fewer words or a shorter line length than in another (or vice versa). As a result, if shifting dimensions are not taken into consideration, translated text may end up overlaying on-screen visuals or not even appearing on the screen at all. When picking font sizes for a project, this should be taken into account.
#4. Avoid Translating Text In Graphics
If texts appear in the game’s graphics, the development team must recreate all affected graphic pictures into the target languages. They must then include all of the new graphics into the game. As a result, best practices in the game translation industry advise against utilizing text in graphics entirely. If your game already has text in the images, however, it’s a good idea to replace it with symbols that can be read in any language version of the game.
#5. Have A Well-Informed Justification For Game Translation
When it comes to game translation and localization, it is strongly advised not to prioritize the number of languages. Instead, concentrate on delivering high-quality translations into a small number of widely spoken languages. It is recommended to only translate into new languages if you have a solid business justification to back up your decision. Because the proliferation of mundane translations could potentially diminish the character of the game and weaken its appeal.
You may like these related posts:
- An Ultimate Guide to Create a Perfect Game Localization Kit
- Top 10 Languages for Game Localization
- What You Need To Handle Before Launching Your Game Translation Projects?
#6. Choose A Reliable Game Translation Company
Gamers expect today’s games to have cutting-edge visuals and functionality, as well as be entirely understandable in their own tongue. Therefore, you should work with translation companies that are up-to-date on gaming jargon, slang, and other important information about many areas of global gaming culture.
With a team of translators who earn language proficiency and have a passion for gaming, GTE game translation services can fulfill the expectations of this ever-growing market.
Contact our experts right now for a free consultation for your game translation projects!
