When localizing games, “Here are the strings and nothing else, good luck” is a one-way ticket to disaster. Style guides are a powerful tool to structure all the information about your game that’s obvious to you but nebulous or hidden to newcomers. Until brain chips for instant telepathic communication hit the market, here’s what you should consider informing translators about, and what you stand to gain from it.
Preserving intent
Naturally, the core purpose of a style guide is to ensure the localized product still conveys tone, meaning, intent and all the subtext you want to preserve from being lost in translation. It’s your chance to make sure some names remain intact or to explain the thought process behind a string, so you get more control over the consistency between the source and the final output.
The names of the end-of-chapter bosses are all based on major Vedic deities (Agni, Aśvins Twins, Soma, etc). Please use the official name for these deities in the target language, even if it induces slight phonetic changes from the English form. Consistency with mythology is what matters.
Donny was raised in a farm far into the countryside, and that is - somewhat stereotypically - reflected in the way he speaks, with his shaky grammar and the apostrophes replacin’ what should be a G. Please make sure the way he speaks stands out in a similar fashion in the target language.
Clarifying the technical stuff
Not all translators are perfectly tech-savvy, and style guides are also useful to ensure they handle anything other than displayed text properly. Specifically, telling them what NOT to touch is crucial to ensure their focus is entirely directed towards what matters.
Double slashes (//) are normal and should be left intact, as they just tell the game to split a dialogue in two separate prompts.
Abbreviations for stats are three characters long in English, and for formatting reasons, we’d like it to stay that way in every language. THR LTR MAX!
Localized strings should never exceed the length of the original by more than 50%.
Or, you know, you could use our custom token feature on the MagnaPlay platform to automate that integrity check. Wink wink.
Dodging grammatical pitfalls
In an ideal world, all languages would be as structurally straightforward as English. In the real world, cars are feminine in French and masculine in German. Check out Suffixes and Male Spoons: the Quirks of Gendered Languages for more details. In any case, the gender neutrality of English can result in difficulties when context is scarce, especially about people.
The main character mentions talking to the Mayor or Fictionalville multiple times. Dialogue doesn’t make it clear but the Mayor is a woman.
If you have variables that fetch nouns from a list, it might be more of a headache than you realize.
“Thank you for giving me this [item_given], [player_name]! You’re the best!” sounds simple enough to localize until you realize that in multiple languages, “this” and “the best” both require additional context to determine grammatical gender. So the best thing is to explain how the variable works and check with your translators that it is suitable for their language.
The [last_fish_caught] variable displays one item name from the fish.json file. Will you be able to use it as is, namely in strings that use it with an article, like “Let me see your [last_fish_caught]”?
Formatting touches
Don’t forget about the small things, like deciding if your translators may switch around date formatting (DD/MM/YY versus MM/DD/YY) or measuring units (consider the metric system outside of NA). Are curse words okay or forbidden? Should they use PC or console terminology for tutorials and menus?
Streamlining development workflow
Informing your teams as well as possible before the beginning of the localization cycle isn’t just good practice, it buys you peace of mind moving forward. There will inevitably be things you did not consider in the style guide! Your future self will thank you for limiting the amout of questions that come your way while you’re all hands on deck preparing the game’s release.
And hey, if you want an easy way to handle requests from the translators, we’ve got you covered with the Points of Clarification (PoC) feature of the MagnaPlay platform. Contextualized questions, all in one place.
Getting a new perspective
Ultimately, this prep work is an interesting opportunity to look at your game’s content from a new perspective. Ensuring clarity for translators is ensuring clarity for players. Having to explain creative decisions in a concise way is bound to challenge them. Compiling strings for them might allow you to spot mistakes or rewrite certain sections. They’re likely to be the first “outsiders” to see the game’s dialogue, take it as a practice round before the big show!