Have you localized your game project?
If so: what was the process like for you? Were there any pain points? What languages did you elect to focus on and was there a specific reason you selected them?
If not, and you are planning to: What languages are you considering? How are you sourcing your translation?
If not, and you are NOT planning to: Is there a particular reason why?
If there was a magic wand to help you localize your game- what would it do, what would change?
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My day job at an indie publisher has a number of titles that have gone through the localization process and I'm always trying to learn more (hence the thread!).
Our titles are typically localized into English and 4-5 other languages, with translation sourced from a trusted vendor. Our largest pain point is in restructuring our key pairs in a format that's easy for our partner to work in and easy to deconstruct back into whatever format we need for the game.
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I’ve worked on two large mobile IPs. One was localized, one was.
The value of localizing a mobile game is retention, as players feel more comfortable and App Store support, as Google/Apple are more likely to feature your app in a country that you’ve localized it for.
If you’re building a game that you will ship and forget, localizing is quite simple. We used localized direct to manage all our strings and worked with an external translator to support EFIGS + Portuguese. Turkish and Russian are two other large gaming populations outside of Asia.
Where it gets complicated is if you A) plan continuous releases or B) will be LiveOps heavy. This will require you to build in localization into your pipeline, and ensure your new updates, in game events, offers, etc are always localized. This may/will be a headache to manage if you’re a small team.
Hope this helps 🤞
What is the tooling like for the translator? Do they have to install stuff?
Often- no. For many translators you'll provide a CSV with the base strings to be localized (English) and then they'll fill in adjacent columns with whatever languages you have requested. Google sheets tends to be good enough for this.
For our projects we'll often provide as much context as we can (Steam keys, trailer, gameplay video, plot summaries) to help translators get a feel for what our project should feel like.