Key Challenges and Best Practices for Chinese Localization

Unlike alphabet letters, which convey sounds, Chinese characters represent meanings: they are often characterised as “morphosyllabic”, meaning that each character represents one spoken syllable and corresponds to one morpheme (minimal unit of meaning). For example, the character 马 corresponds to the syllable “mǎ” and carries the meaning “horse”. Because of its nature, Chinese is a high-density information language, where each syllable/character conveys a large amount of information.

In video game localization, this density has a direct impact at every level of the text, from UI to in-game descriptions and dialogues. Let’s think of elements such as a two-character item name, a four-character skill description or a six-character piece of flavour text: when these strings need to be translated, localizers often find themselves making decisions about which part of the meaning to preserve and which to sacrifice, all while keeping an eye on character limits and overall tone of the game. This is especially true for the Italian language which, compared to Chinese and English, has notoriously longer sentences and uses more words to express concepts.

To give a practical example, taking into consideration the space constraints of a game UI becomes particularly relevant in genres such as hidden object puzzle games, where the player has to find hidden objects in a specific scene by reading the labels provided. The labels of the items that have to be found must be short, comprehensible and unambiguous. Let’s take an object such as “禁止狗狗进入标志”: the Chinese label uses eight characters to convey the meaning of “‘No dogs allowed’ sign”. In Italian, a faithful translation would be “Cartello ‘Vietato l'ingresso ai cani’”, but this solution would require over thirty-five characters, making it unusable in a small UI element, especially in a working scenario where the client has asked to keep the translation as short as possible, let’s say, using a maximum of three words.

Example: Translating Hidden Object Labels

Let’s take an object such as “禁止狗狗进入标志”: the Chinese label uses eight characters to convey the meaning of “‘No dogs allowed’ sign”. In Italian, a faithful translation would be “Cartello ‘Vietato l'ingresso ai cani’”, but this solution would require over thirty-five characters, making it unusable in a small UI element, especially in a working scenario where the client has asked to keep the translation as short as possible, let’s say, using a maximum of three words.

Reducing Text Length Without Losing Meaning

A possible solution to avoid this kind of problem is as follows: stripping away from the translation everything that can be inferred from context and visuals, and only keeping the core message. In a scene of a hidden objects game, the player can see on the screen the object they have to find (hopefully, that’s the point of the game!). In this example, the object they are looking for is a sign with a symbol. Therefore, in translation, it is possible to remove the word “sign” (“cartello”) and only keep the message of the sign itself, with quotation marks around it: “Vietato l’ingresso ai cani” (“No dogs allowed”).

But, whoops! The text is still too long (the client has asked to use a maximum of three words), so the next step is rephrasing to shorten it: “Cani non ammessi”. Eight characters in the Chinese source, sixteen in the Italian target: still double the length, but the label is usable and understandable, and in line with the client’s request.

Another characteristic of the Chinese language that has practical consequences on game localization is the fact that Chinese nouns and verbs do not inflect for case, gender or number. This information, especially the grammatical number (singular or plural), is conveyed through context, quantifiers or the occasional use of the plural suffix 们.

For example, the sentence “马来了”, taken out of context, means “The horse has arrived”/“The horse is arriving” and “The horses have arrived”/“The horses are arriving”. On the contrary, in Italian every noun, adjective, article and verb must agree with a specific category: male or female and singular or plural.

Considering what mentioned above and applying it to another example from a hidden objects game, let’s assume the player has to look for the following object: “溜冰鞋”. Since it can refer to both “ice skate” and “ice skates”, the item label “溜冰鞋” gives no certain indication of whether the player is looking for one skate or a pair. In Italian, this distinction is mandatory: “pattino” (singular: “ice stake”) and “pattini” (plural: “ice skates”), and using the wrong form would mislead the player about what object to look for.

In cases like this, having a visual reference while translating, provided by the client, is absolutely necessary to resolve these kinds of ambiguities.

Let’s picture another scenario: a dialogue scene, with a line which might appear in any action or RPG game: “准备好了吗？战斗即将开始。”, translated in English as: “Are you ready? The battle is about to begin.” Neither Chinese nor English expresses the grammatical number or gender of the person being addressed.

However, in Italian, the adjective “ready” has to agree in gender and number with the subject “you”, and a translator working on this line must answer some questions before they can provide a natural translation: is the speaker addressing one person or several? If one, is that person male or female? If several, is the group composed of mixed people, all male, or all female? According to the answer to these questions (in hope that an answer will indeed be provided), the possible solutions to translate “ready” in Italian would be: “pronta” (singular, feminine), “pronto” (singular, masculine), “pronte” (plural, feminine), “pronti” (plural, masculine).

When Rephrasing Becomes Necessary

Luckily, translators have learned to be resourceful in every situation, and in cases when no information is provided and visual references are unavailable, they resort to the last solution, which is reframing the sentence so that the agreement problem simply does not arise. Instead of addressing the character directly, the line is rephrased so that it indicates the general state of things, the general situation: "È tutto pronto? La battaglia sta per iniziare" (“Is everything ready? The battle is about to begin”).

Rephrasing is not always the most fitting or perfect solution, but it’s a pragmatic one that is often required to get the job done when not enough references/information are provided to the translator.

Translating Character Titles and Honorifics

The fact that Chinese nouns do not inflect for gender and number also has an impact when translating titles and honorifics related to characters: 老师 (“maestra”/“maestro”), 天王 (“imperatrice”/”imperatore”), 守护者 (“guardiana”/“guardiano”), 朋友 (“amica”/”amico”) etc. They work for both genders in Chinese (and often also in English), but in Italian they must be translated knowing to what character/gender they refer.

Sometimes, when possible, to avoid the problem we can use epicene words, which are words that have only one form to indicate either gender (“老师”, for example, can be translated as “insegnante”/”teacher”, which works for both genders), but even in this case, articles, adjectives and verbs around the word have to agree with the right gender. Therefore, context is always crucial and we can rarely do well without it.

Parataxis and Implicit Relationships in Chinese

Finally, another characteristic of the Chinese language that has a direct impact on translation choices is the fact that Chinese is generally considered a paratactic language: this means that clauses and concepts are arranged one after the other without connectives showing the relation between them.

Making Implicit Meaning Explicit

Unlike Italian, which relies on prepositions, articles, and agreement endings to express the relationships between words, Chinese builds meaning through the sequential juxtaposition of morphemes, allowing for conciseness, flexibility, and a degree of interpretive openness.

Let’s take the name of a generic weapon in a generic videogame, “远攻净化箭矢” (“Ranged Purifying Arrow”). The Chinese name juxtaposes various elements without any connectives: 远 (distant), 攻 (attack), 净化 (purify), 箭矢 (arrow), their relationship is implicit: an arrow that purifies something when used in ranged attacks.

In Italian, the relationship between these elements has to be made explicit with the use of prepositions, in order to make the phrase comprehensible: “Freccia della purificazione a distanza”.

Moreover, unlike alphabetic languages, in Chinese there are no spaces between words/characters to clearly indicate their boundaries. Therefore, generally speaking, in order to successfully understand a text (from short phrases to longer sentences), the reader has to segment the text of continuous words into chunks and understand their meaning from the context. Of course, this challenge can often lead to ambiguities, and a perfect example of this has been provided by George Ou in the 8th and 9th images of this very interesting post.

The fact that different languages encode reality in fundamentally different ways is extremely fascinating. There would be many other topics to examine in order to cover all the challenges in localizing from Chinese to Italian, such as the translation of idiomatic expressions and chengyu, or the fact that, very often, seemingly ordinary words can open an entire cultural universe that needs to be carried over in the target text. But these topics deserve their own dedicated exploration, maybe in a future article!