With over 43.8 billion dollars of revenue earned in just the 2018 year alone, it’s easy to see how profitable the gaming industry has become over its nearly fifty-year history. Its upward climb has been a steady one for years now, with growth-rates comfortably sitting in the double-digits every year for the past decade. In 2018, this growth carried the industry to never-before seen heights as its $43.8 billion overtook the total revenues for the global cinema box office at a comparatively-measly total of $41.7 billion, and the global streaming service revenue at $28.8 billion.

As the industry has expanded, so too has its need for proper localization practices. Games are no longer mono-lingual endeavors targeted solely at local markets, but highly-global media entertainment that, in many cases, must work to appeal to mass markets in various language regions to capitalize on returns. As of 2019, the current top-10 countries by gaming market revenue span three continents and eight official languages, with each language encompassing various dialects and formatting issues exist that require their own changes to be made to game scripts and UI. As such, consideration must be taken by companies to provide the level of cultural and linguistic quality necessary to make those language releases a success. If the gaming industry therefore wants to maintain its prosperity as it continues on a trend of increased global revenue and international traction, it is in its best interest to establish well-defined, industry-wide standardizations for localization QA.

Localization QA—A Brief History

In the early days of the industry when consoles were only just beginning to pop up on the home market, import production was done on a smaller and much less intensive scale, with slews of games released at sub-par linguistic quality in exchange for increased market volume through the 1980s. From the 90s onward, as major companies like Nintendo began regulating the quality of their releases and other companies began following suit in order to keep up, the overall quality of both gaming software and hardware began to increase. Even so, internationalization was still a new concept and not a very well-defined one. Global markets, as a result, were still low-priority for developers, and plenty of games reached foreign audiences without the proper linguistic and cultural vetting. Ask any fan of imported games from the late 80s and into the early 2000s, and they’ll no doubt have their fair share of examples to regale you with.

In 1989, Zero Wing gave its fans the often-quoted “All your base are belong to us” line. The 90s’ Tamagochi title for the Gameboy reminded its players to “Flash the toilet,” while Final Fantasy V’s wyverns mysteriously became “Y burns” in translation. While these sorts of translation and localization mistakes can make for amusing anecdotes, they can also become a severe loss of revenue if they manage to impact the company’s quality reputation, or worse, offend their regional audiences. 2002’s Kakuto Chojin received intense global backlash for using chanted verses of the Quran as a character’s theme music, eventually leading Microsoft to do a complete, worldwide withdrawal of the game three months after its release. Similarly, the 2016 title Persona 5 drew harsh criticism from its Korean fans after a character’s shoes included a motif of the Rising Sun Flag, a symbol that many Koreans see as an extension of Japan’s unapologetic nature towards imperialism and the history of comfort women.

Current Problems in Localization QA Standardization

Looking at these issues from a third-party perspective, it’s easy to preach about the many ways these mistakes could have been avoided. They should hire better translators, spend more time and manpower on quality checks, postpone deadlines, consult local players for cultural blunders—the list goes on and on. To say this, however, disregards the difficulties the industry faces when it comes to standardization, regardless of whether or not industry players want to separate themselves from potential bad practice or not.

For many companies, a major cause for improper localization QA is the status quo. Most companies have their own internal practices and standards that have been carried over from project to project for years. Breaking free from a decades’ old current can be both difficult and costly. This speaks nothing to companies with multiple teams, which themselves may have practices that differ from the other branch offices. Convincing teams with different standards to assimilate can cause internal strife as well as confusion for all parties involved.

Other companies struggle with high-quality localization QA because they don’t properly understand the concept itself. Games have been translated for years, but internationalization and localization are still relatively-new ideas in the industry. For many companies, up-front internationalization preparation and back-end multilingual localization are offhand asides whose burden gets passed onto unwilling developers, standard QA testers with no background in linguistic testing, or even the translators themselves. When teams are made up of people with no background on what needs to be looked-out for, or no knowledge of how those changes will be implemented, it’s easy for errors like hard-coded script strings, UI differences in expansion or contraction, lack of linguistic context, and more to slip through the cracks.

The final, and perhaps most-infamous, cause of improper localization is a thorn that has been stuck in the industry’s side since its inception: “crunch culture.” Seen by many as an unavoidable aspect of the industry, video game “crunch” refers to the period of time in which video game developers are expected to work overtime in order to meet deadlines set by producers. As unforeseen, and sometimes unavoidable, complications arise during the various stages of development, workers are still expected to play catch-up to fit the strictly-defined release schedules made by the company ahead of time. It’s the unfortunate double-edged sword of the industry: setting a release date too far off into the future can cause upset among fans who don’t want to wait years for the experience, but setting them too soon tempts fate when it comes to development issues and delays.  

How to Move Localization QA Forward

What, then, can be done to help fix these problems? Thankfully, many companies are already working to change the industry and reshape how localization QA is done. First and foremost is education on localization, and how the industry as a whole understands it. The Game Developer’s Conference has been slowly expanding its conference offerings to include panels and roundtables on localization practices, and 2018 saw the introduction of the Game Global Summit, a subsidiary to the larger LocWorld network dedicated to localization solely as it pertains to the games industry. With these conferences has come greater, widespread understanding of what localization entails and how it can be best-practiced within companies alongside development.

With more understanding of localization practices can also come better multilingual preparation throughout development. Localization should not begin with the translation phase, but should be considered early on as assets are prepared in the original language of production. Proper checks for text formatting issues, hard-coded strings, font and encoding conversion issues, non-localized art, and more can be done early on in development with a standardized internationalization pass using pseudo-localized builds. Making sure these checks get done alongside the standard language development can save companies significant time and money along the way. Not only that, but it can be an important, early-development step to prevent crunch further down the line.

To make those steps happen though, it helps to have localization departments built into a company with knowledgeable talent that understands these processes, as well as LSPs specifically dedicated to localization QA as it pertains to games. Many triple-A companies, from Square Enix to Ubisoft, have created their own in-house localization teams. Likewise, companies like Keywords Studios and Andovar have made niches for themselves specifically in games localization in order to maximize their output quality and overall expertise. As professionals from the early days of the industry have become localization veterans, and as more schools and programs have begun dedicating themselves to specialized training in localization, it’s no longer an impossible feat to fill entire localization departments and localization QA-facing LSPs with people who are well-versed in the practice.

Conclusion

All in all, there are many small steps that can be taken to help the industry reach its best potential, and professionals within the industry are starting to recognize importance of those practices. In 2011, the International Game Developer’s Association (IDGA) published the first draft of their Best Practices for Game Localization—a self-titled “’how-to’ guide for the translation and culturalization of video game content.” The guide outlines proper practices for culturalization, internationalization, and localization, and even provides project planning outlines and example timelines. All of this was done with the goal of providing a concrete source for localization practices to help standardize the industry at large. At only 33 pages, the most recent iteration of the document falls short of other well-known localization standards like ISO 9001, but it still stands as a concrete step towards overall industry regulation, and a sign that companies are making the effort to enact change. The games industry is still—after all—a relatively new facet of the overall language entertainment industry, but even so it has played a huge role in the general recognition of localization as a concept. If companies continue to work towards establishing best practices, those ripples will no doubt spread throughout the industry, which will only help to increase the overall satisfaction of both workers and players alike.

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