GDC Localization 2010: Global Spanish

Victor Alonso Lion and Diana Díaz Montón gave perhaps the most useful presentation of the day with their Localizing for the Global Spanish Speaking Community. The vast number of Spanish speakers in the world is daunting, made worse for marketers and localizers by the array of dialects. Victor and Diana did their best to synthesize all of the data. The information here comes from their presentation, an extended discussion I had with Victor during the SIG meeting two days later and some additional research. Any mistakes here are mine, not theirs.

The first thing to realize is that the Spanish speaking world is vast, located on two sides of the Atlantic. While the languages are all mutually intelligible, that does not mean that a resident of Buenos Aires will find it easy or pleasant to hear a Mexican or Madrid-based TV show. How many different versions of Spanish are there? Well, the answer becomes how finely you want to slice. Victor and Diana presented strikingly different sound bites of the same phrase from Spain, Argentina, Chile, Columbia and US/Mexico.

How different are these? Very. Simple terms in one country’s dialect might be a venomous curse in another. The polite word for “female” might mean “bitch” in another place. Further, basic terms in each language (pronouns, conjunctives, etc.) are different from one another. (I’d really appreciate if people could give examples in the comments.)

What is a game localizer to do in such a situation? The current solution has been to split the Spanish world into two parts: Castilian Spanish for Europe and Latin American Spanish targeted to the Western Hemisphere. While this works fine for Spain, it bulldozes the differences between the Western Hemisphere dialects.

Effectively, when we have our translators render Latin American Spanish, they create a neutral, understandable and inoffensive product which everyone can understand. David suggests Disney first created the concept of a single, neutral Latin American dialect to more effectively distribute their films.

The problem with neutral Spanish is that the language is not just neutral, but neutered. Imagine the scene from the movie Die Hard with Bruce Willis swinging down on the bad guys, bare feet bleeding, machine gun in hand, yelling, “Yippee kay yea, motherfuckers!” A neutral language might have to change that. “Comin’ to get you, boys?” That’s not memorable.

Is neutral Spanish bad? No, but it lacks emotional content. It would be hard to imagine a blockbuster — an entertainment product that strongly connects to people — using a neutral language. In fact, neutral language generally means lower perception of quality, both in the general population and, critically, in the local press. To maximize production values, different markets should be targeted.

-> Spain, with Castilian Spanish (the largest market)
-> US/Mexican Spanish, by far the richest market of Spanish speakers in Latin America
-> Argentina, with a population of 40 million and relatively wealthy
-> Chile, with a population of 17 million, but 50% more per capita wealth than their Argentine neighbors
-> Colombia, also ~40 million people but with half the GDP of Argentina

Another possibility, suggested by Victor, would be to mix the languages. For instance, a sports game could use a mix of well-known announcers from several countries: say Mexico, Argentina and Columbia. Spanish speakers would relatively easily understand (and forgive) speakers clearly from a different country, as well as feel attachment to the announcer from their country. It’s an elegant solution that limits the number of SKU’s a publisher must create.

Also, translation can be handled differently for the dialects to save time and money. An original translation can be done from English to Castilian Spanish, then a conversion from Castilian to the different dialects.

Another solution is to allow for amateur translations to be integrated into the final project. While this means potentially lower quality work in some cases, enthusiasts can do extremely good quality (note Wikipedia). Further, the amateurs working on the project then become evangelists for it, increasing market share.

Below are the slides from Victor and Diana’s presentation at the GDC Localization Summit in San Francisco, March 2010.