GDC Localization 2010: Bioware Presentation

Ryan Warden and Chris Christou from Bioware gave a solid and stunning look at what takes place at their very large projects for localization. The summary of their presentation has already been well documented for the non-localization reader here. Read it now, if you haven’t already.

Some bits of data that weren’t included, or came out in the question-and-answer period:

Mass Effect 2 (450k words) was fully translated into four languages: French, German, Italian and Polish. There were text only translations into Spanish, Czech, Hungarian and Russian. There was an initial effort to localize fully into Russian that went so far as recruiting voiceover actors, but that part of the project was shelved due to market forces.

Dragon Age was fully translated into French, German and Polish. Text translations were done for Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian and Russian. Given that there were between 900k and 1M words of text in this title, it’s understandable why the language list was shortened like this.

When asked about Asian languages, there was a “No comment” answer.

Each language had a relatively small group of translators in order to keep consistency throughout the work. Teams were composed of just three translators each.

The truly remarkable items in the presentation were the extensive Character Bible and string tracking facilities. If these were not in place from the very beginning, the project would have been quickly lost in a sea of changes as the games got developed. The other solid choice was when they decided that the text was locked down and ready for translation: one month after the English voiceover had been completed.

This was a very good, detailed nuts-and-bolts look at two projects that are much bigger than any non-MMO on the market today.

Below are snaps of most of the presentation’s slides. Click on any image to download the full-size photo. Please let me know in the comments if you have anything to add to this summary.