微软亚洲研究院 可视化

With the Asian market rapidly growing, almost every ambitious IT product sooner or later faces the challenge of localization for this region. And without knowing all its facets any localization project is rather doomed to fail. That’s why we at Alconost have decided to translate and share with you the article on localizing games for Asia by Plarium, a global game developer with solid experience in game localization. We found here some useful approaches that are also valid for our localization projects and hope that you’ll like the reading, too.

随着亚洲市场的快速增长，几乎每个雄心勃勃的IT产品迟早都会面临该地区本地化的挑战。 在不了解其所有方面的情况下，任何本地化项目都注定要失败。 因此， Alconost决定与您翻译并分享Plarium的有关亚洲游戏本地化的文章， Plarium是一家具有丰富游戏本地化经验的全球游戏开发商。 我们在这里找到了一些对我们的本地化项目也有效的有用方法，希望您也喜欢阅读。

For Western developers, entering the Asian market is like entering outer space, only 30 megabytes heavier. Localizing games into Japanese, Chinese, and Korean requires a Herculean effort. You need to account for certain technical requirements and scrupulously research the market and the target audience’s mindset. But if this is your dream, keep reading — our experience should stand you in good stead.

对于西方开发商而言，进入亚洲市场就像进入外太空，仅重30兆字节。 将游戏本地化为日语，中文和朝鲜语需要费劲的努力。 您需要考虑某些技术要求，并认真研究市场和目标受众的心态。 但是，如果这是您的梦想，请继续阅读-我们的经验将使您处于稳定状态。

平稳运行 (A Smooth Operation)

In Plarium games are translated in 12 languages. And the localization department has 4 different focuses:

在Plarium中，游戏翻译成12种语言。 本地化部门有四个不同的重点：

1. Mobile games手机游戏
2. Browser-based games基于浏览器的游戏
3. Social games社交游戏
4. Non-game texts (translating and adapting internal company documents)非游戏文字(翻译和改编公司内部文件)

The department is made up of three mini-teams of three to four people, each of which handles the entire language suite for its focus. Each teammate is responsible for up to three languages. All editors and translators are native speakers of the target language and work with various teams.

该部门由三到三人组成的三个小型团队组成，每个团队负责处理整个语言套件。 每个队友最多负责三种语言。 所有编辑和翻译都是目标语言的母语，并且与各个团队合作。

Our own experience has convinced us that the wheel has to be reinvented every time — there is no universal localization algorithm.

我们自己的经验使我们相信，每次都必须重新发明轮子-没有通用的定位算法。

Every project is unique not only in terms of its genre, setting, and mechanics but also the particular nature of localizing games for various platforms.

每个项目不仅在类型，设置和机制上都是独特的，而且在各种平台上本地化游戏的特殊性也是如此。

调整引擎 (Tweaking the Engines)

Superdata, the mobile segment accounts for 59% of the Asian game market and is worth USD 20 billion.Superdata的统计，移动市场占亚洲游戏市场的59％，价值200亿美元。

本地化的一般关键阶段 (General Key Phases of Localization)

1. Research. Study the market and scout gaming communities. When working with the Asian market, the language barrier can be felt particularly acutely — Asian gamers usually don’t know English well enough to game in it. Things get even more complicated with China because the Chinese have their own version of the internet with restricted access that people in other countries can’t use.

   研究。 研究市场和侦察游戏社区。 与亚洲市场打交道时，语言障碍尤其明显-亚洲游戏玩家通常对英语的了解不足。 对于中国来说，情况变得更加复杂，因为中国人拥有自己的互联网版本，访问受限，而其他国家的人们则无法使用。

2. Culture. The cornerstone of localization is paying attention to the unique cultural and historical features of countries and the mindsets of players there. In the game Pirates: Tides of Fortune, for example, the main antagonist is the king of Spain. We didn't change the nationality of the big bad in the Spanish localization, and gamers took it as part of a fictional setting, nothing more. In the Chinese-speaking segment of the market, however, a similar situation wouldn’t exactly have a positive influence on user attraction. Another example is the care that must be taken with slogans and calls to action. For instance, for Germany, we advertise our strategy games without using the German words for “wage war,” “attack,” or “build an empire” despite the fact that these actions are an integral part of Plarium’s games. Over several years of working with translators, we’ve developed special methods for sanding down these harsh phrases.

   文化。 本地化的基石正在关注国家的独特文化和历史特征以及那里的参与者的心态。 例如，在游戏海盗：财富潮汐中，主要对手是西班牙国王。 在西班牙的本地化中，我们并未更改大问题的国籍，而游戏玩家则将其视为虚构背景的一部分，仅此而已。 但是，在说中文的市场中，类似的情况不会对吸引用户产生积极影响。 另一个例子是口号和行动呼吁必须引起注意。 例如，对于德国，尽管这些行动是Plarium游戏不可或缺的组成部分，但我们在广告策略游戏时并未使用德语来表示“工资战争”，“攻击”或“建立帝国”。 在与翻译人员合作的几年中，我们已经开发出特殊方法来消除这些苛刻的短语。

3. Feedback about the localization of a specific language is gathered little by little from a variety of sources. The best thing to do is to collect opinions from native-speaking marketing experts, analysts, sociologists, translators, and gamers.

   有关特定语言本地化的反馈逐渐从各种来源收集到。 最好的办法是收集来自以英语为母语的营销专家，分析师，社会学家，翻译和游戏玩家的意见。

4. Logic and flexibility. Every language has its own flexibility and logic. For example, if you’re fluent in Russian, you can easily adjust to software requirements. However, Russian isn’t as compact and concise as English. And German, for example, has a fixed work order.

   逻辑和灵活性 。 每种语言都有自己的灵活性和逻辑性。 例如，如果您能说流利的俄语，则可以轻松地适应软件要求。 但是，俄语不像英语那样简洁明了。 例如，德语具有固定的工作顺序。

5. Uniqueness. The new localization needs adaption to the existing interface and code as much as possible. The challenge is to account for the unique characteristics of all supported languages. You can try to create a universal interface, but you’ll still end up having to tweak it to match the grammatical structure of the language.

   独特性 。 新的本地化需要尽可能适应现有的接口和代码。 面临的挑战是要考虑所有受支持语言的独特特征。 您可以尝试创建一个通用接口，但最终仍然需要对其进行调整以使其与语言的语法结构相匹配。

6. Lore. The mobile version has no descriptions of units. This fact does not affect the story, but still has an impact on the depth and sophistication of the game world. Thus, when moving from the social and browser-based segments to the mobile segment, there’s a great temptation to make texts as brief and functional as possible. This originates from the widespread opinion that people come to mobile games to play, not to read. Nevertheless, we don’t want to completely lose the rich lore we've developed, so we try to use quests, timelines, and side quests to introduce new characters and delve into the universe’s history. We try to strike a balance between the storyline, atmosphere, and maximally functional texts.

   绝杀 。 移动版本没有单位描述。 这个事实不会影响故事，但仍会影响游戏世界的深度和复杂程度。 因此，当从社交和基于浏览器的细分转移到移动细分时，很容易使文字尽可能简短和实用。 这是因为人们普遍认为人们会去玩手机游戏而不是阅读。 但是，我们不想完全失去已经开发的丰富知识，因此我们尝试使用任务，时间表和辅助任务来引入新角色并深入研究宇宙的历史。 我们试图在故事情节，气氛和功能最大化的文本之间取得平衡。

准备启动-检查兼容性 (Preparing for Launch — Checking for Compatibility)

1. Taboos and preferences. Japan has its own relationship to gaming culture in general — it’s more fanatical and more commonplace at the same time. Video games are an integral part of Japanese life. Japanese people mostly play games on the way to work or home, since their commute often takes up two to three hours of their day. Japanese people tend to get completely swept away by a single trend. They even have a whole TV channel dedicated exclusively to video games. However, the games that are in the lead can change very quickly. For strategy games that people play for years, this is an interesting challenge. In Korea, bright neon colors (especially pink) are favorable in game design. Everything needs to be colorful and flashy. When working with the Chinese market, don’t get carried away with unreal, eye-catching phantoms. And avoid using the same shade of red found on the Chinese flag.

   禁忌和喜好 。 一般而言，日本与游戏文化有着自己的关系-同时更加狂热和普遍。 电子游戏是日本生活不可或缺的一部分。 日本人通常在上班或回家的路上玩游戏，因为他们的通勤通常要花两到三个小时。 日本人趋于完全被单一趋势所扫除。 他们甚至拥有专门用于视频游戏的整个电视频道。 但是，处于领先地位的游戏可能会很快发生变化。 对于人们玩了多年的战略游戏而言，这是一个有趣的挑战。 在韩国，明亮的霓虹色(尤其是粉红色)在游戏设计中很受欢迎。 一切都必须色彩鲜艳，华而不实。 与中国市场合作时，请不要被虚幻，引人注目的幻象所迷惑。 并避免使用与中国国旗相同的红色阴影。

2. Just truth, just hardcore. Games in English are popular in Asia despite the fact that most users, including young people, aren't all that fluent in foreign languages. Localization is very important for the Asian market, but there’s one caveat: if your game looks obviously Western, don’t try to jump higher than the rising sun and transform the app into something that is supposedly Asian through and through. You can try to change the game until it’s unrecognizable, swapping out everything up to and including the mechanics, and pretend the app was made in China, but it’s probably not going to work. No matter how hard you try to copy the Asian style, Asian players will smell a rat. Gamers don’t like being tricked, so avoid creating a dissonance between the game’s design and its text. Try to be as honest as possible, and don’t pawn the game off as an Asian product when it isn’t one. The localization should be professional and use lively, natural language. Gamer culture is pretty receptive to experimentation. There's nothing wrong with leaving a Western game the way it is and preserving its terminology. Borrowing concepts from English-language games is okay. For example, there’s no need to find a Japanese or Korean equivalent of the word “quest,” since this term is familiar to Asian gamers. Moreover, the tide of globalization has yet to be stemmed, and there’s no law against focusing on worldwide pop culture in games. In general, users from Asia are interested in the unique nature of Western culture — it’s considered a progressive trend.

   只是事实，只是铁杆 。 尽管大多数用户(包括年轻人)并不精通外语，但英语游戏却在亚洲很受欢迎。 本地化对于亚洲市场非常重要，但有一个警告：如果您的游戏看起来显然是西方的，请不要试图跳到比初升的太阳还高的位置，并将应用程序逐步转变为可能是亚洲的东西。 您可以尝试更改游戏，直到无法识别为止，换掉包括机械在内的所有内容，并假装该应用程序是在中国制造的，但可能无法正常工作。 无论您多么努力模仿亚洲风格，亚洲球员都会闻到老鼠的味道。 玩家不喜欢被欺骗，因此请避免在游戏的设计和文字之间造成不协调。 尽量诚实，不要将游戏当成不是亚洲产品而当做游戏。 本地化应该专业并且使用生动自然的语言。 玩家文化很容易接受实验。 保持西方游戏的现状并保留其术语没有错。 可以从英语游戏中借用概念。 例如，由于亚洲玩家熟悉此词，因此无需找到与“ quest”一词对应的日语或朝鲜语。 而且，全球化的潮流尚未被遏制，没有法律反对在游戏中关注全球流行文化。 总的来说，亚洲用户对西方文化的独特性感兴趣-这被认为是一种进步趋势。

3. Technical requirements. Asian characters are heavy. In Latin alphabets, each character equals one byte. In the Cyrillic alphabet (used in Russian, Bulgarian, etc.), each character is equal up to two bytes. But each traditional Japanese character can weigh up to four bytes. A full set of traditional Chinese characters weighs about 30 megabytes. Adding this set to a game will make the app a little bit bigger. We use fonts with simplified typesets of Chinese characters that only weigh about 18 megabytes. As part of the reform of the Chinese educational system in the mid-20th century, the appearance of many characters was changed in order to make them easier to remember. Nowadays China has almost completely switched to the simplified version, but the traditional set of characters is still used in Hong Kong. In Stormfall: Rise of Balur we prepared two versions of the game’s localization, which, needless to say, had an effect on the size of the app: about 36 megabytes. Later on we're going to test the audience’s reaction to both locales and decide whether or not to keep both sets of characters in the game. Things are a little simpler with Korean — its writing system is just an alphabet masquerading as logograms.

   技术要求 。 亚洲字符很重。 在拉丁字母中，每个字符等于一个字节。 在西里尔字母(用于俄语，保加利亚语等)中，每个字符最多等于两个字节。 但是每个传统日语字符最多可以重四个字节。 全套传统汉字重约30兆字节。 将此设置添加到游戏中会使应用程序更大。 我们使用带有简化的中文字符集的字体，这些字体仅重约18兆字节。 作为20世纪中叶中国教育体制改革的一部分，许多字符的外观发生了变化，以使它们易于记忆。 如今，中国几乎已完全转换为简化版本，但香港仍使用传统字符集。 在《暴风雨：巴尔鲁斯的崛起》中，我们准备了两个版本的游戏本地化版本，这无疑对应用程序的大小产生了影响：大约36兆字节。 稍后，我们将测试观众对两种语言的React，并决定是否在游戏中保留两组角色。 使用韩语，事情要简单一些-它的书写系统只是伪装成字母的字母。

4. How to find editors and translators. The requirements for choosing translators and editors for Asian markets are much harsher. For translating into Western languages, the candidate just has to have the minimum amount of localization and gaming experience. When it comes to the Asian market, we need translators with particular experience in localizing Western games, and preferably mobile strategy games. At first, we had our translations edited by native speakers who play our games on Facebook. Now and then we would get feedback from them such as, “it’s a good translation, but that’s it.” Gamers would say that the atmosphere had been conveyed inaccurately or that a term had been used incorrectly. For example, casual games have “lives,” but strategy players are used to talking about “energy.” We got feedback on our translations not just from players, but also from journalists and writers who evaluated the literacy and quality of the translation, as well as the purity of the language and the balance between borrowed terms and concepts from the target language. Taken together, this feedback helped us find suitable translators and editors.

   如何找到编辑和翻译人员 。 为亚洲市场选择翻译和编辑的要求更加苛刻。 为了翻译成西方语言，候选人仅需具有最少的本地化和游戏经验。 谈到亚洲市场，我们需要在本地化西方游戏(尤其是移动策略游戏)方面具有特定经验的翻译。 首先，我们的翻译是由在Facebook上玩我们的游戏的母语人士编辑的。 有时我们会从他们那里获得反馈，例如“这是一个很好的翻译，仅此而已。” 玩家会说气氛传达不正确，或者术语使用不正确。 例如，休闲游戏具有“生命”，但是战略参与者习惯于谈论“能量”。 我们不仅获得了玩家的翻译反馈，还获得了记者和作家的反馈，他们评估了翻译的素养和质量，以及语言的纯度以及从目标语言中借来的术语和概念之间的平衡。 总之，这些反馈意见帮助我们找到了合适的翻译和编辑。

5. Special testing. In order to evaluate usability, we captured videos of our Japanese testers playing the game. This approach was more effective than getting a written or oral review of the game. Politeness is paramount in Japanese culture, so Japanese people often feel uncomfortable giving someone an objective evaluation or admitting that there are certain aspects of the game they don’t understand or like. Japanese testers are more likely to provide a generalized, but utterly useless review. On the video, however, everything is crystal clear, even without words. By watching the gamer’s fingers move across the screen you can see how they played through the tutorial, which reactions and emotions they experienced while playing, and what they were caused by.

   特殊测试 。 为了评估可用性，我们捕获了我们的日本测试人员玩游戏的视频。 这种方法比获得游戏的书面或口头评论更为有效。 礼貌在日本文化中至为重要，因此日本人通常会感到不舒服，无法对某人进行客观评估或承认他们不了解或不喜欢游戏的某些方面。 日本测试人员更有可能提供广义但完全无用的评估。 然而，在视频上，即使没有任何文字，一切也非常清晰。 通过观看玩家的手指在屏幕上的移动，您可以了解他们在本教程中的玩法，玩耍时的感受和情感，以及造成的原因。

而且我们出发了 (And We’re Off)

Localizing a game for the Asian market is a long, labor-intensive process that demands a lot of effort. But if you approach it responsibly and create a high-quality translation, users will appreciate it.

将游戏本地化为亚洲市场是一个漫长的劳动密集型过程，需要大量的精力。 但是，如果您负责任地处理它并创建高质量的翻译，则用户将不胜感激。

关于翻译 (About the translator)

Alconost is a global provider of localization services for apps, games, videos, and websites into 70+ languages. We offer translations by native-speaking linguists, linguistic testing, cloud-based workflow, continuous localization, project management 24/7, and work with any format of string resources. We also make advertising and educational videos and images, teasers, explainers, and trailers for Google Play and the App Store.

Alconost是为70多种语言的应用程序 ， 游戏 ，视频和网站提供本地化服务的全球提供商。 我们提供由母语为母语的语言学家，语言测试，基于云的工作流，连续本地化，24/7项目管理以及任何格式的字符串资源提供的翻译。 我们还为Google Play和App Store制作广告和教育视频和图像，预告片，解释器和预告片。

翻译自: https://habr.com/en/company/alconost/blog/475462/

微软亚洲研究院 可视化