Localization Shenanigans in the Chinese Speaking World

In this 2017 GDC session, IGDShare's Jung-Sheng Lin discusses a wide variety of possible issues that can arise when undertaking Chinese localization for your game. These problems include grappling simplified vs. traditional Chinese, naming problems, UI & fonts, and China-specific policies that may relate to localization, political implications, and more.

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[jung-shenglin]

Thanks for all of you jumping into the discussion in the comments.

I am considering putting the content of my talk on Gamasutra since the video editing of my session looks a bit awkward.

[Tobi-cins]

What's with the editing? Would make a huge difference to have the slides on screen when the speaker is talking about them.

[FlameRat_YehLon]

Oh and, if anyone is trying to translate games that use pixelated fonts, keep in mind that there's only two font sizes you can use when dealing with Chinese: 11px, and 16px. For dialogues and things like that, if you are gonna use general text that's the only two options you have. It's good for nostalgic as well, since old Chinese (language) games all looks like that.

Also, it's a common practice to show English in monospacing and have the width exactly half of a Chinese character. Usually not that hard to achieve though. And if there's vertical text, since you don't rotate characters to show Chinese in vertical direction, it would be better if you convert English letters into full-width ones and treat them like Chinese characters.

[sharkinahat]

Why the dried don't you show the slides for a little longer?

[SomeReallyUniqueName]

Localization in any language is always more then just feeding the texts through Google translate. Only recently, while watching a video of BF1 and hearing how the Germans were talking, and comparing to the other accents, did I think 'wait, they did not talk like that'. And not just the words but the way they talked to each other. Every small nuance can be important. Similarly to watching a dubbed TV show where stuff like formal vs informal gets mixed up by people when translating into their native tongue. Whenever I have the power I always ask natives to translate into their own tongue and allow them very much leeway in completely overhauling the texts. What is easily said in one language can be very difficult in another.

[FlameRat_YehLon]

As a gamer in mainland China, I'd say that the idea of not allowing foreign words in game is totally stupid. Sometimes it just doesn't work because it doesn't fit the style. As for bad translations, well, there's almost no good translations out there. I personally would play Japanese games in Chinese if it has official translation, but English games? Well, I just play in English because it's more natural. I can't understand all the words because I'm not a native speaker, but I can understand most of it.

There're two other issues not being stated in the video, one is, the issue handling Chinese texts. Some games uses charmaps to show texts but when you are dealing with Chinese you need an absolutely huge map. It would be better if the game engine uses a text engine in the first place. True, you can use tool to dump charmap, but if your game is showing 9px text, there's no way to show Chinese correctly because Chinese needs at least 11px font size to show correctly.

Another issue is the way game handles text inputs. In Chinese speaking region (Japanese and Korean as well) you would need an IME to type words. However, if the game doesn't take that into consideration, you might feel the game got locked-up when you are not typing because you left IME on, and the IME pad might be out of place when you are typing text, or you just simply can't type text in game. Ever since Minecraft supports Chinese people have been injecting a modified version of bcd.class or use InputFix/NihongoMod to just being able to type properly in the game, until 1.9, but it still doesn't disable IME when it should. The proper way to handle it is, when not typing in game, disables IME, and when typing, try to implement proper IME pad position if that's possible. So far it seems that the only company that does this 100% right is Blizzard, there's ultra-solid IME implementation in their games.

And here's some advice to gamedevs from the prespective of a gamer/ newbie gamedev/ fansub contributor: don't use machine translation, and if you don't have other options, at least translate the text back to see if it's the same meaning or not; consider having a list of usual terms for game UIs so that at least you can do UI translation almost painless and almost flawless; ask for feedback from players; if you don't have time for two Chinese translations, at least do a proper Traditional Chinese one, because, believe it or not, people still use Traditional Chinese in mainland China (for example, in caligraphy), though not every day.

By the way, here's a fun little fact: in mainland China, The Elder Scrolls series is usually called 老滚 or just 滚 by fans, which is a short term of the badly official translation of the title, 老头/滚动条, aka elder/scroll bar, back when TES3 was released in China. (The slash isn't in the actual title and is for word separation only.) Since this translation is way to hilarious, fans just use that as a nickname of the franchise. It's just easier to say 滚5 rather than 上古卷轴5 or 上古5. (上古卷轴 is kinda the current official translation now because it's used by Sonkwo, a game key retailer that got the license from Bethesda, and even on the Steam page of TESV the name is used.)

[leezhieng]

Question, if 菜单 is the legacy word, what's the new/accurate word for menu?

[jayeisenhardt]

33:14 I almost started laughing my ass off at the 'gambling' as it's what those Chinese games are know mostly for. Pay to win with a big wheel of fortune and a chance to lose everything every upgrade. I think the simple work around is a huge cost item that makes it not a gamble and that squeaks by.

[arhavu]

Interesting stuff. Very much liked the versatile way in which you considered the various problems and the possible solutions. Now if only I could understand the Taiwan/Chinese Taipei -thing... ...yes, I do understand about the One China Policy and such, we have a similar thing (in my mind) here in Europe with Macedonia vs. Macedonia, I simply cannot wrap my brain around the fact that de facto countries and regions exist as-is, but de jure they _for_some_reason_ have to be called with circumlocutious names...

[remioum]

great talk on a topic mostly left behind...go Taiwan (dev show was great btw)!! -show the slides while he speaks!-

[ivragi]

As a "NES era" kid, when most of the games was in "moonspeak" and we don't understand a thing, i was very exited to see the games on ps1 with russian translation in them. And my gosh i'm so understand this frustration of bad or machine translation. When you see the native letters and words but they are complete nonsence.
Hope one day this "Babylon" will end and human all over the globe will talk in one language, no matter wich one especially, but one, so we can understand each other a little better.

[brentlio]

I can't stress enough how BAD many non-Chinese game's translations are. In Mainland China, mandarin, '精靈寶可夢' sounds unbelievably stupid. Not sure what's up with me, but this name succeeded at disgusting me. And it doesn't contain any bad meaning. Boggles my mind...

On the other hand, the Chinese translation of Counter Strike is '反恐精英'. A translation that had a clearer meaning than the original name. It literally means "Counter Terrorist Elites", perfectly stuck with what Counter Strike is about. Look back at the English name "Counter-Strike"... I wouldn't understand what the hell this meant if I didn't already have played the game for so long.

Take apart the newest installation of CS, the CS: Global Offensive. Translated as "全球攻勢". Not literal translation of course, "Global Offensive Stance". Absolutely perfect naming for both Languages.

[best-tof]

Very interesting talk, thanks for providing these insights!