Towards sustainability in the games localisation industry

Miss Silvia Ferrero

Localisation, defined as the “adaptation of a product, application or document content to meet the language, cultural and other requirements of a specific target market” (Ishida & Miller: 2005) is a multi-million pound industry that seems to keep expanding at an extraordinary rate. The localisation of games is no longer restricted to the main European languages, or FIGS, as they are known in the industry, and these days it is not uncommon to deal with products that are being localised into 15 languages, from Russian to Arabic, Norwegian to Chinese. In addition, companies are getting more ambitious and try to release their products simultaneously in a larger range of territories.

This behaviour is partly understandable; it has been proven that localising a product can potentially increase its sales tenfold, or even more. Similarly, users are now more informed than ever and demand to be treated as their counterparts in the US and Japan; releasing a product in certain territories months later than the original version is no longer desirable. However, short schedules and an ever-increasing range of languages and territories, with their own linguistic and cultural differences, can pose many problems.

In order to meet ridiculous deadlines, developers and language service providers usually rely on more than one translator of a particular language per same project, increasing the possibility of common mistakes such as inconsistencies in the terminology and style. In addition, given the fact that localisation is a fairly young industry, it also suffers from a lack of well-trained professionals specialised in the field, especially in those languages which have been recently added to the range on offer.  This also poses the additional problem of finding suitable candidates who can assess the quality of the work of those professionals before the project is in its late stages, which is not helped by the seeming lack of games localisation-oriented training in universities around the world.  

Games localisation poses some unique challenges which must be overcome by the language professionals if the quality of the finished product is to be ensured. Bad localisation can be fatal for any company and can mean staggering losses of revenue, especially in an age where players are more demanding than ever and do not shy away from giving bad online reviews to products whose quality is not deemed acceptable. It has happened in the past that a game failed to sell in one particular territory following complaints from users in well-known industry websites and forums.

This paper will attempt to explain briefly the different stages of the localisation process and will explore the sustainability of the localisation processes currently used.  It will analyse different perspectives from a wide range of localisation professionals, from translators to trainers, producers to localisation managers and even industry recruiters, and will ultimately try to identify the challenges that the industry in general must overcome in order to guarantee its own sustainability.