The Weekly Question...

With this week’s question we are focussing on the potential obstacles in game localisation.

How difficult is it to localise a gaming product from Japanese into English and from English into other European languages? What presents the biggest challenge—grammar, semantics, humour or cultural references?

So, this week’s question goes as follows:

What gaming concepts used in a source language do you find most difficult to replicate in your native language?

We asked our colleagues and got quite intriguing answers. Each of them is talking about specific challenges in their language pair.

Thibault Carpentier, Project Manager

When I think of a "Challenge in translation", the first idea that comes to my mind – in a near-pavlovian manner – is "cultural references"; and humour would probably reign upon that category.

However difficult it can be to find an adequate equivalent to a good joke (or a bad one), when it comes to localising video games, this is something we come across more often than not. This is one of the numerous skills that the gaming localisation translator must have, compared to the legal or medical one (but I might be wrong, there might be hilarious contracts…).

There are very basic workarounds such as compensation that will tackle 90% of the jokes, but is that specific to games? Well it can be. Especially contextual jokes. And now I’m sure any 30+ gamer will react to this one: "monkey wrench". This was one of the most infamous jokes of gaming history: in The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, the player has to use a monkey on a valve in order to reveal a hidden passage. This didn’t make much sense, even to English-speaking players, until they understood the monkey wrench pun. Now think about it: it’s a joke embedded in the gameplay… a play on words… without words. This is nightmare material for us right there. How did the translators work around that issue? Well, they didn’t. The Monkey Island series is known for its absurd elements, the monkey wrench appeared as another one of them, and the joke was lost in most languages (as far as I am aware). This cannot be satisfying. But could the translators do otherwise? I’d love to discuss that with them.

Overall, jokes and cultural references are always challenging, and their context can be a huge constraint. But when a joke is the basis of a gameplay feature, well you just open the translators’ tear valve with a monkey wrench.

Robert Hill, Japanese to English Localisation Specialist

While directly translating text from Japanese can be problematic at the best of times, it is by no means the most difficult thing you would encounter when localising a videogame or other narrative work.

Japan, culturally, can sometimes seem a million miles away from our own here in Europe or North America, and finding ways to present that culture in a way that is both meaningful yet authentic is extremely challenging. There are those who believe that localisation should purely be a matter of translation, but it is rarely that simple. While enthusiasts might understand certain cultural nuances specific to some types of Japanese game, the vast majority will not. Editing a line or two of text or code to make something more understandable to a broader western audience is not an exercise in promoting ignorance in Japanese culture, but is actually helping to promote it. The challenge comes in finding where this can be done in the most meaningful way and is something which can cause a great deal of debate within the industry.

There is also the issue of regionalisation. Japan is a country with an extremely long history, and as such there is a strong sense of regional identity within its own borders. Be it the differences between the standard Japanese spoken in and around Tokyo to the energetic, earthy tones of the Osaka accent, or the island-life loving Ryukyuan people compared to the people residing in the northern and colder-climes such as in Aomori, Japan is a country brimming with unique regional flavour. Being from the UK, I am at something of an advantage here as we also have a large array of different accents and dialects to draw upon, but for those wishing to localise first to other regions that may be a little more difficult. That is not to say that a strong West Yorkshire accent is called for in every type of game, but it is nice to have such things available to you. In recent years there have been some great successes, such as in the localisation of Level 5’s Ni no Kuni, which shows how well localisation can be done when thought is put into it.

Japan is a unique and fantastic place and I am extremely lucky to be in a position where I can help contribute to furthering understanding and awareness of its long, deep and varied culture. However, doing so presents many challenges and is something that requires much thought and deliberation.

Irene Doval Marcos, English to Spanish Localisation Specialist

Let me give you several examples of the tricky gaming concepts when it comes to Spanish localisation:

Playthrough: To play the main history of the game, without getting into collectibles etc. from the beginning to the end. We do not have a word for that in Spanish.

Grinding: To have to kill monster after monster to level up just enough to be able to do the next quest. Again, we do not have a word for that in Spanish, we would have to put all that explanation in our language.

Hoard: To accumulate as many items and coins as you can, especially from corpses. “Accumulate” does not really gives the same implication, as it is a very specific term. We don’t have an equivalent word in Spanish, so we would have to use something like “accumulate treasure” or something.

In the three cases, the translation would have to be an explanation of the word, which would require more than one word and most of the times create a sentence that is just too long and doesn’t follow the original grammar.

Inna Kryvoruchko, English to Russian Localisation Specialist

English into Russian localisation requires a lot of resourcefulness and creativity as well as some efforts on transforming the text before it obtains the native Russian look and feel. English and Russian belong to different language families, which means that there are some significant differences in the sentence structure, grammar, and meaning of certain words. So, no surprise that in the process of translation we use transformations on all linguistic levels. There are no direct lexical analogues for some English concepts in Russian, which means we need to resort to contextual and descriptive translation, i.e. translate the term depending on the context or sometimes explain what a certain term means.

Of course, we need to avoid translator’s false friends at all costs and always keep the game context in mind.

Let’s take, for example, such a commonly used gaming term as Inventory (the amount of objects that a character has at their disposal in the game). There is a direct analogue of this word in Russian «инвентарь». Although most probably borrowed from English, its meaning in Russian is somewhat different: “Tools and equipment owned by an enterprise or a household that can be used in the process of work or doing sports”. The direct Russian analogue would be a perfect solution in the areas such as construction, agriculture, and sports. However, if an in-game inventory is used to store other kinds of objects, then we should come up with a different term based on the context: It could be «арсенал» (arsenal) for weapons, or «карманы» (pockets), «сумка» (bag), «рюкзак» (backpack) for all kinds of smaller stuff depending on its size and designation.

Last but not least, the biggest challenge of the EN-RU localisation are references to some movies, cartoons, TV programs, and cultural phenomena that just don’t ring any bells with the Russian-speaking audience. In such a case, we need to dig into the main idea of such a reference and find a cultural parallel that would be familiar to the Russian consumer and suitable in the context.