By a team of three (Gaya, Melissa and me), we localized the Game Google Feud. The game was found on GitHub.  The game was originally in English. We localized it into FR, DE and ES.

At first, we were trying to localize it to Chinese, Russian. However, we found trouble localizing it into non-roman languages. This will be discussed in details in the following section.

 

Challenges and Solutions

1. “24” ways does not work

The traditional “24 Ways” of externalizing strings does not work for this project. This is because all the strings are in the variable.  As you can see in the screenshot below:

 

Our solution is that we created separate HTML and JS files for different languages. And we add languages pickers to every site so that everytime somebody clicks one language, it will direct you to the page in that language.

 

2.  No results for non-roman languages

At the beginning, we were thinking of localizing this game into Chinese and Russian. However, when we translated everything into RU and CN, there were no results. As shown in the screenshot below. This applies to all non-roman characters. Therefore, we decided to only localize into Roman languages.

Our team member contacted the original author of this game to find out the reason of this problem. We got the reply that the system automatically recognizes non-roman languages as “error symbol” and shows no result.

 

3. Add a language picker?

The language picker can help us locate the correct language files in the folder. However, how to create a folder path that applies to everyone’s computer? Add “..” (two dots) at the beginning of the overarching folder and details the folder path to find the correct language files.

 

4. Bad translation does not work! We need transcreation!

Because the translation we did goes directly to the google website and it pulls the results in real time, bad translation will not show us the ideal results. If we translate the strings poorly, we cannot fully localize this game into other locales.

Additionally, this game contains a lot of cultural rich contents. Questions such as “Power Rangers are …” may not apply to other countries such as Germany because Power Rangers is not very famous in there. Instead, we need to find the equivalent of the “Power Rangers” in Germany and replace it with that to reach the same effect.

 

 

You can find our final presentation HERE. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.