subject: Square Enix Localization Looks To The Future [print this page] Few companies know the ins and outs of game localization (adapting a game from its native region into something that sounds natural and appropriate in other languages) better than Square Enix. The English localization of Square's games has gone from laughable -- see the barely-comprehensible English script for Final Fantasy II circa 1991 -- to some of the best around. Much of the credit can be traced back to Richard Honeywood, who spoke at GDC five years ago on his work to take Square's localization department from two people to a full team during the PlayStation era.
Square Enix audio programmer Hikaru Taniyama and localization translator Masaharu Shibayama spoke today about the company's efforts to confront the growing challenges to translation and localization. As a technical presentation, the bulk of the discussion centered around a software tool called Moomle. Programmed by Taniyama, Moomle allows the team to track changes to the script and audio of a large game. It's a reflection of how much has changed for Square Enix over the past few years Runescape Money
.
However, the panel was quite illuminating within its larger context. As the company's struggles to complete games like Final Fantasy Versus XIII have demonstrated, the production standards established in the '90s are no longer sufficient to remain competitive. This holds as true for localization as for any other aspect of the development process. The standard release schedule for Square Enix's internally developed games used to be staggered across regions: The Japanese version would lead, followed nine to 12 months later by the U.S. version, with a European edition coming as much as a year after that (if at all). With the Japanese market continuing to shrink and the international market growing in importance, games like Final Fantasy XIII-2 must be released almost simultaneously across the world to remain viable.
The challenge here is one of scale. FFXIII-2's script was fully voiced (with more than 18,000 spoken lines in total) and contained more than half a million characters of Japanese text -- the equivalent of nearly 1.4 million English words, which doesn't even touch on the half-dozen other languages the game was translated into. Yet Square published the game worldwide within seven weeks of its Japanese debut, compressing the traditional localization approach (complete the game in Japanese and build the international versions from there) into a simultaneous process.
"These days, the bigger the game, the more languages you'll need to translate the game into," Shibayama remarked ruefully.
As Shibayama noted, the old-fashioned localization process was ideal for translators, since it allowed them to work from "frozen" text that would never change. Simultaneous localization is far more difficult, as dialogue and other in-game text is constantly changing; some lines are written out, while others change placement and context without warning. Where Square's greatest localization challenge used to be simply churning out authentic dialogue, now the real task comes in coordinating a game's constantly evolving game text in seven different languages between internal and external teams.
While FFXIII-2's localization wasn't perfect, the fact that Square managed to hit its release goals with the game after so many years of struggling to come to terms with the needs of the current console generation is a sign that the company is finally reinventing itself to compete in the new market, driven by blockbusters on a global scale.
