When translating mobile games, the translator is involved in the process of creating language versions when the main gameplay has already been implemented and published. This simplifies the work of the translator, since you can download the game and familiarize yourself with it.
Different games require different degrees of understanding of the gameplay, but in practice, 20-40 minutes is enough to fully understand the meaning, genre and style of the game. In the future, this will help to choose the tone of the translation when there is ambiguity in interjections, pronouns and replicas of characters. For the translation of mobile games, we involve translators-players, since there is no shortage of them.
The studios and game developers will participate in the main process of creating the language version of the game, exporting, importing and debugging text information takes place on their side. If there are no specialists on the client`s side who understand the processes of creating a game, it will be very difficult for a translator to work with such a client.
The format of the source and translation files determines the convenience of the translator`s work and the error-free process of importing translated texts. Do not forget that texts in Chinese or Arabic look good in Excel format, but in TXT, XML, Markdown and other text formats, when you need to work with text in a special encoding, some or all of the characters may be distorted. Most export programs can export game text in XLS, in our opinion, this is the most convenient format for the translator to work with.
Stage two - translation of the game. The most popular languages for game localization are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. There are developers who want to enter Asian markets and then the set of languages looks different - Chinese, Korean, Japanese.
Particular attention should be paid to the limitations of the translated text by signs. Even if the client does not have such a requirement, it is worth clarifying it, because in the absence of experience, the client may simply not be aware of this feature of the translation. In particular, German and French bring a lot of torment to our translators, who are trying to find equivalents for short words in English and Russian in these languages that increase several times.
