7 Things You Should Do Before Sending Your Game for Localization

Starting off strong, something that's probably decided day one in a new project, and with this you can already start making the translators you haven't even quoted yet happy.

Having metadata strings that we, laypeople, can identify and deduce from makes *such* a huge difference. It's a delight to open our CAT tools' context window and see "Upgrade_shop_header" or "LittleJohnnyQuest01Title" instead of random strings of letters and numbers!

Speaking of early prep work that makes translators happy, let's talk reference material.

Translators are an inquisitive bunch. Good translators, doubly so. Once a project starts, we WILL ask about anything and everything: genders, speech quirks, character limits, font compatibility, location names, dialogue contexts etc, etc, etc. The best foot forward you can put to your translating team is handing them a several-GB-large folder with anything remotely important to your game's vision along with the first batch of files to localize. You will still have to check your Q&A sheet regularly and even answer things present in the references -because we are also perfectly capable of being dumb and/or lazy- but I guarantee that'll cut the volume of queries by at least a third.

And on the topic of queries (man, I'm killing it with those segues! :D), the Q&A sheet is a time-honored and -tested tradition of loc projects. Any LSP worth their salt will set one up (or ask you to set one up) and put it at the loc team's disposal. Once the queries start popping up, we expect (and often need) to see answers in a reasonable timeframe. Few things piss off a translator team like seeing the same blank "Answer" cells week in, week out while new batches keep popping up and being delivered, forcing us to keep record of things we need to change and begging for full exports of the lockit to deliver the text with minimal inconsistency.

So please, make sure there's someone responsible for checking the query sheet at least a few days a week, and, if you're feeling nice, slap a "working on it" notice on queries when you need more time. We'll be thankful.

One of the *other* few things that piss off translation teams is a jumbled file where UI and player-facing text is right next to dialogues and item descriptions, in no cohesive order.

Ordering a file properly will save us all dozens of queries and pulled strands of hair. Tutorials next to tutorials, items next to items, UI next to UI, dialogues in the order they'll be read etc. If I had a dollar for every line of dialogue that had a borked follow-up because we didn't know it had a follow-up at all, I'd be able to buy the EV of my dreams.

Many times, we don't have the luxury of a game build to check for text placement, and even tiny details can change how we approach a line. So we ask: give us your comments! Nothing you add to a file will be wasted, from vital info like the gender of an NPC and the number of characters in a conversation to the reference to that obscure game from the 90's you swear no one else has played. Your comments might be the difference between us following your vision and your favorite joke being sacrificed on the altar of r/woosh.

We hate the altar of r/woosh.

Now we're getting into the prime stuff, the things only the most thoughtful and most awesome of devs think of doing.

Most games have some sort of variable system, be it for objective texts, handling dialogue options or even generating button sprites for tutorial texts. While absolutely necessary, whenever bits of text are stripped away from their rightful place in a sentence, the risk for incompatibility increases. Maybe some languages can't properly flex the gender or number of “<item> acquired!”, or maybe there’s a language out there where the same word can mean “juicy hamburger meat” or “a pile of animal dung” depending on context.

The point is: it’s worthwhile to go through the text formatting and tagworks with language consultants, so they can point out possible issues for each language, and you can brainstorm solutions together.

One task not typically associated with translators (I should know, I just learned it was a thing, like, last week!) is visual inspection of assets. Each culture has its own memetic landscape, which aggregates symbols, sounds, expressions and the like with various aspects of its history, good and bad. You can’t be expected to know every possible association yourself, of course, so give us a ring and slip us a few quid so we can make sure your cool faction emblem doesn’t happen to be associated with our local brands of violent ethno-nationalists and/or drug dealers.

Let’s wrap this up with what might feel to some like nitpicking, but I promise it comes from a place of love. Please, pretty please with whipped cream and sprinkles on top, do NOT reuse text fragments on multiple places. It might mean extra work or larger files, but it’s better to have twenty copies of the same line translated exactly the same than relying on a single instance to fill every possible use case, when those use cases are probably only valid in English anyway. We always prefer working with the highest amount info and flexibility, in order to deliver the most natural and pristine experience possible in our own languages.